Circumbinary disk modeling of silicate-carbon stars

Silicate-carbon stars are characterized by oxygen-rich (O-rich) dust features despite their carbon-rich (C-rich) photospheres. While the origin of silicate-carbon stars has been a mystery ever since their discovery, the most widely accepted hypothesis is that the silicate-carbon stars have a low-luminosity companion and the O-rich material is stored in a circumbinary disk or a circumstellar disk even after the primary star becomes a carbon star. In order to study the properties of circumstellar dust envelopes of silicate-carbon stars, we perform radiative transfer model calculations using RADMC-3D with an axi-symmetric dust density distribution (a disk) as well as a spherically symmetric dust distribution. For various dust envelope models with different shapes and chemistry, we calculate the model spectral energy distributions (SEDs) and compare the model results with the observed SEDs of selected 5 silicate-carbon stars. The Circumstellar disk models are fairly well fitted with the observational data of 5 silicate-carbon stars. We find some evidences that the circumbinary disk model could be a better explanation for the origin of silicate carbon stars than the simple detached silicate dust shell model of the transition phase of the stellar chemistry.