R Coronae Borealis fadings: a dusty gas cloud eclipse model
R Coronae Borealis stars (RCBs) are hydrogen-deficient supergiants that undergo deep fading events due to transient extinction by dust. First observed over two centuries ago, that behaviour remains poorly understood. Our aim is to investigate the possibility that the fading events are eclipses by orbiting, dusty gas clouds. We construct a simple physical model of the dust wind that is driven from the cloud surface by the stellar radiation field, and we calculate the extinction and scattered light from wind and cloud. We consider a broad range of dust compositions. For the model that best matches the data, we sketch out implications for the RCB phenomenon more broadly. Our calculations show that conventional dust materials like graphite and silicate produce eclipses whose ingress is too slow and whose morphology too symmetric to account for RCB fadings. But dust made of solid H2 yields a good match: the eclipses are deep and strongly asymmetric, with rapid onset and slow recovery, and event timescales are about right if the clouds' periastra are within a few tens of AU. Such close approaches imply tidal stripping/disruption of each cloud, with hydrogen-deficient debris accreting onto the star via a disk. Starlight incident on the disk creates a metal-ion plasma that emits a powerful bremsstrahlung continuum, peaking in the mid-IR. We conclude that eclipses by orbiting, dusty clouds could be the cause of RCB fading events, but only if the dust is made of solid H2, in which case both the unusual, hydrogen-deficient nature of the stars and their mid-IR excess follow naturally. It is, however, challenging to account for the high eclipse rates that are observed; we propose a scenario in which the progenitor star is a wide binary inside a massive halo of clouds, suggesting a connection to the Galactic "missing mass" problem.