Hot massive stars are known to possess radiatively driven winds. When the stars
cool during their course of evolution, these winds stop because the stars
are too cool to drive a wind radiatively. Nevertheless, especially during the
cool phases of stellar evolution, e.g., during the red supergiant (RSG) phase,
the stars eject a lot of material in form of rings of shells. The mechanism
responsible for the mass ejection is not well known, but surface instabilities
caused by pulsations seems to be promising in driving large mass ejections in
combination with dust driving of the released material.
Due to the cool effective temperatures of the RSGs, dust and molecules can
relatively easily condensate in this high-density circumstellar material.
Hence, the ejecta can be detected via imaging especially in the infrared
spectral region. These images usually show beautiful dust shells and rings
around these stars.
Surprisingly, not only the cool RSGs show dusty rings or shells of ejected
material, but also the much hotter luminous blue variables (LBVs) and, even more
surprisingly, the B[e] supergiants are surrounded by huge amounts of cool
molecular and dusty material. In the case of the B[e] supergiants it is even
assumed that they form extended circumstellar rings or disks. And
since B[e] supergiants are eligible to maintain strong line-driven winds, it is
speculated that these disk or disk-like structures are formed by some
non-spherically symmetric mass loss. Such non-spherical mass loss could
be linked to the (rapid) rotation of the stars. Rapid rotation seems also
to act in shaping the asymmetric so-called LBV nebulae. It is thus
important to understand the influence of (rapid) rotation on the shaping of
the winds of hot, luminous stars.
Our studies concentrate on the structure and kinematics of both the
winds and
disks for stars in different evolved stages.