The episodic dust-making Wolf-Rayet star HD 38030 in the Large Magellanic Cloud.

Mid-infrared photometry of the Wolf-Rayet star HD 38030 in the Large Magellanic Cloud from the NEOWISE-R mission show it to have undergone a dust-formation episode in 2018 and the dust to have cooled in 2019–20. New spectroscopy with the MagE spectrograph on the Magellan I Baade Telescope in 2019 and 2020 show absorption lines attributable to a companion of type near O9.7III-IV. We found a significant shift in the radial velocity of the C  iv λλ5801–12 blend compared with the RVs measured in 1984 and 1993. The results combine to suggest that HD 38030 is a colliding-wind binary having short-lived dust formation episodes, like the Galactic systems WR 140 and WR 19, but at intervals in excess of 20 yr. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]