Related papers: Wolf-Rayet stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud as …
The central region of the Milky Way provides a unique laboratory for a systematic, spatially-resolved population study of evolved massive stars of various types in a relatively high metallicity environment. We have conducted a…
The environments surrounding nine Wolf-Rayet stars were studied in molecular emission. Expanding shells were detected surrounding these WR stars (see left panels of Figure 1). The average masses and radii of the molecular cores surrounding…
We present refined color-color selection criteria for identifying Wolf-Rayet (WR) stars using available mid infrared (MIR) photometry from WISE in combination with near infrared (NIR) photometry from 2MASS. Using a sample of spectrally…
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…
We use integral field spectroscopy to study in detail the Wolf-Rayet (WR) population in NGC 3310, spatially resolving 18 star-forming knots with typical sizes of 200-300 pc in the disc of the galaxy hosting a substantial population of WRs.…
The aim of this paper is to look at the evolution of massive stars in order to determine whether or not the progenitor of V838 Mon may be a massive star. In the first part of this paper, the evolution of massive stars around solar…
The final explosive fate of massive stars, and the nature of the compact remnants they leave behind (black holes and neutron stars), are major open questions in astrophysics. Many massive stars are stripped of their outer hydrogen envelopes…
We present the analysis of archival Very Large Telescope (VLT) Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) observations of the interacting galaxies NGC 4038/39 (a.k.a. the Antennae) at a distance of 18.1 Mpc. Up to 38 young star-forming…
We present a variability study of 4646 massive stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) with known spectral types from the catalog of Bonanos et al. (2010) using the light curves from the OGLE-III database. The goal is to exploit the time…
We present Cloudy modeling of infrared emission lines in the Wolf-Rayet (WR) nebula N76 caused by one of the most luminous and hottest WR stars in the low metallicity Small Magellanic Cloud. We use spatially resolved mid-infrared…
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…
M101 is an ideal target in which to test predictions of massive star birth and evolution. The large abundance gradient across M101 (a factor of 20) suggests that many more WR stars must be found in the inner parts of this galaxy than in the…
Stripped stars are hot, helium-rich stars formed when binary interactions remove a star's hydrogen envelope. While low-mass ($\lesssim 1 M_\odot$) and high-mass ($\gtrsim 8 M_\odot$) stripped stars are well studied as hot subdwarfs and…
Wolf-Rayet stars represent one of the final stages of massive stellar evolution. Relatively little is known about this short-lived phase and we currently lack reliable mass, distance, and binarity determinations for a representative sample.…
We addressed the physical and kinematical properties of Wolf -- Rayet [WR] central stars (CSs) and their hosting planetary nebulae (PNe). The studied sample comprises all [WR] CSs that are currently known. The analysis is based on recent…
The progenitors of many Type II supernovae have been observationally identified but the search for Type Ibc supernova (SN Ibc) progenitors has thus far been unsuccessful, despite the expectation that they are luminous Wolf-Rayet (WR) stars.…
This paper discusses our ongoing efforts to characterize dust-enshrouded Wolf-Rayet (WR) stars in the radio and infrared. We have used the Very Large Array to measure the broadband radio spectrum of WR stars in suspected binary systems and…
As hosts of living high-mass stars, Wolf-Rayet (WR) regions or WR galaxies are ideal objects for constraining the high-mass end of the stellar initial mass function (IMF). We construct a large sample of 910 WR galaxies/regions that cover a…
We present the results of a systematic search for large-scale spectroscopic variability in apparently single Wolf-Rayet stars brighter than ~12.5. In this first paper we characterize the various forms of variability detected and distinguish…
Envelope stripping, whether through single-star wind mass loss or binary mass transfer, is a key evolutionary pathway for the formation of classical Wolf-Rayet stars and lower-mass stripped helium (He) stars. However, to study the evolution…