Related papers: Wolf-Rayet stars probed by AMBER/VLTI
Wolf-Rayet (WR) stars are helium-burning, evolved massive stars which have had most of their hydrogen-rich outer layers removed either through stellar winds and/or binary stripping. Here we report on LMC173-1, a WN3+O binary located in the…
Due to the recent dramatic technological advances, infrared interferometry can now be applied to new classes of objects, resulting in exciting new science prospects, for instance, in the area of high-mass star formation. Although…
Wolf-Rayet (WR) stars are the evolved descendants of the most massive stars and show emission-line dominated spectra formed in their powerful stellar winds. Marking the final evolution stage before core collapse, the standard picture of WR…
Towards the end of their evolution hot massive stars develop strong stellar winds and appear as emission line stars, such as WR stars or LBVs. The quantitative description of the mass loss in these important pre-SN phases is hampered by…
Wolf-Rayet stars (WRs) represent the end of a massive star's life as it is about to turn into a supernova. Obtaining complete samples of such stars across a large range of metallicities poses observational challenges, but presents us with…
Wolf-Rayet (WR) stars are evolved massive stars, presumably on their way to becoming supernova. They are characterized by high luminosities and fast and dense stellar winds. We have detected signs of a radio continuum pinwheel associated…
Wolf-Rayet stars have been detected in a large number of galaxies experiencing intense bursts of star formation. All stars initially more massive than a certain, metallicity-dependent, value are believed to experience the Wolf-Rayet phase…
Determining the Galactic distribution and numbers of massive stars, such as Wolf-Rayet stars (WRs), is hampered by intervening Galactic or local circumstellar dust obscuration. In order to probe such regions of the Galaxy we can use…
We present new radio and optical observations of the colliding-wind system WR146 aimed at understanding the nature of the companion to the Wolf-Rayet star and the collision of their winds. The radio observations reveal emission from three…
We investigate Wolf-Rayet (WR) stars as a source of feedback contributing to the removal of natal material in the early evolution of massive star clusters. Despite previous work suggesting that massive star clusters clear out their natal…
Do some Wolf-Rayet stars owe their strong winds to something else besides radiation pressure? The answer to this question is still not entirely obvious, especially in certain Wolf-Rayet subclasses, mainly WN8 and WC9. Both of these types of…
The high luminosity of massive, early-type stars drives strong stellar winds through line scattering of the stars continuum radiation. Their momenta contribute substantially to the dynamics and energetics of the ambient interstellar medium…
We present the results of an ongoing investigation to provide a detailed view of the processes by which massive stars shape the surrounding interstellar medium (ISM), from pc to kpc scales. In this paper we have focused on studying the…
The AMBER instrument installed at the Very Large Telescope (VLT) combines three beams from as many telescopes to produce spectrally dispersed fringes from milli-arcsecond angular scale in the near infrared. Two years after installation,…
We investigate the influence of Wolf-Rayet (W-R) stars on their surrounding star-forming molecular clouds. We study five regions containing W-R stars in the inner Galactic plane ($l\sim$[14$^\circ$-52$^\circ$]), using multi-wavelength data…
Surveys of Wolf-Rayet (WR) stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) have yielded a fairly complete catalog of 154 known stars. We have conducted a comprehensive, multiwavelength study of the interstellar/circumstellar environments of WR…
Using a code that employs a self-consistent method for computing the effects of photoionization on circumstellar gas dynamics, we model the formation of wind-driven nebulae around massive Wolf-Rayet (W-R) stars. Our algorithm incorporates a…
In this paper we derive stellar parameters for the Wolf-Rayet star in the gamma Velorum binary system (WR11), from a detailed non-LTE model of its optical and infrared spectra. Compared to the study of Schaerer et al., the parameters of the…
Studies of magnetic fields in the most evolved massive stars, the Wolf-Rayet stars, are of special importance because they are progenitors of certain types of supernovae. The first detection of a magnetic field of the order of a few hundred…
Aims: Following our comprehensive studies of the WR stars in the Milky Way, we now present spectroscopic analyses of almost all known WN stars in the LMC. Methods: For the quantitative analysis of the wind-dominated emission-line spectra,…