Symbiotic Stars at Optical, Infrared and Radio Wavelengths

Abstract

No paper of this nature should begin without a definition of symbiotic stars. It was Paul Merrill who, borrowing on his botanical background, coined the termsymbioticto describe apparently single stellar systems which combine the TiO absorption of M giants (temperature regime ≲ 3500 K) with He II emission (temperature regime ≳ 100,000 K). He and Milton Humason had in 1932 first drawn attention to three such stars: AX Per, CI Cyg and RW Hya. At the conclusion of the Mount Wilson Ha emission survey nearly a dozen had been identified, and Z And had become their type star. The numbers slowly grew, as much because the definition widened to include lower-excitation specimens as because new examples of the original type were found. In 1970 Wackerling listed 30; this was the last compendium of symbiotic stars published.