A&A 459, 137–145 (2006) Astronomy DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361:20053008 & c ESO 2006 Astrophysics Bright Be-shell stars,, Th. Rivinius1,S.Štefl1, and D. Baade2 1 European Southern Observatory, Casilla 19001, Santiago 19, Chile e-mail:
[email protected] 2 European Southern Observatory, Karl-Schwarzschild-Str. 2, 85748 Garching bei München, Germany Received 25 March 2003 / Accepted 28 June 2006 ABSTRACT Echelle observations are presented and discussed for 23 of the 27 known “normal” shell stars brighter than about 6.5 mag. In addition to those typical cases, three stars with known transitions between emission & shell and pure emission line appearance, and three rapidly rotating B stars without records of line emission (Bn stars) are added to the sample. Long-term V/R emission-line variability and central quasi emission bumps (CQEs) in photospheric lines were found in 75% of all normal shell stars. This strongly suggests that the velocity law in most, if not all, disks of Be stars is roughly Keplerian. Both phenomena may occur in the same star but not at the same time. This is in agreement with the previous conclusion that CQEs only form in the presence of negligible line-of-sight velocities while long-term V/R variations are due to non-circular gas particle orbits caused by global disk oscillations. V/R variations associated with binary orbits are much less pronounced. Similarly, phase lags between different lines were detected in long-term V/R variable stars only. A binary fraction of only one-third is too low to support binary hypotheses as an explanation of the Be phenomenon.