Related papers: New mass estimates for massive binary systems: a p…
Clumping in the winds of massive stars may significantly reduce empirical mass-loss rates, and which in turn may have a large impact on our understanding of massive star evolution. Here, we investigate wind-clumping through the linear…
We compare our latest single and binary stellar model results from the Cambridge STARS code to several sets of observations. We examine four stellar population ratios, the number of blue to red supergiants, the number of Wolf-Rayet stars to…
The mass-loss rates of massive helium stars are one of the major uncertainties in modern astrophysics. Regardless of whether they were stripped by a binary companion or managed to peel off their outer layers by themselves, the influence and…
Symbiotic stars, which generally comprise a red giant and an accreting white dwarf, are excellent laboratories to understand mass transfer in wide binaries, with application to a wide family of systems. One of the fundamental questions is…
Determining accurate orbits of binary stars with powerful winds is challenging. The dense outflows increase the effective photospheric radius, precluding direct observation of the Keplerian motion; instead the observables are broad lines…
Wolf-Rayet stars (WRs) are very important massive stars. However, their origin and the observed binary fraction within the entire WR population are still debated. We investigate some possible merger channels for the formation of WRs,…
Massive stars that become stripped of their hydrogen envelope through binary interaction or winds can be observed either as Wolf-Rayet stars, if they have optically thick winds, or as transparent-wind stripped-envelope stars. We approximate…
This paper presents calculations for forbidden emission line profile shapes arising from colliding wind binaries. The main application is for systems involving a Wolf-Rayet (WR) star and an OB star companion. The WR wind is assumed to…
Stellar rotation has long been recognized as important to the evolution of stars, by virtue of the chemical mixing it can induce and how it interacts with binary mass transfer. Binary interaction and rapid rotation are both common in…
The evolution of a binary star system by various analytic approximations of mass transfer is discussed, with particular attention payed to the stability of these processes against runaway on the thermal and dynamical timescales of the mass…
Recent results with the Potsdam Wolf-Rayet (PoWR) models have shown that Wolf-Rayet mass loss can be explained by radiative wind driving. An inspection of the galactic WR sample, however, reveals that a significant part of the observed WR…
Massive stars lose a significant fraction of mass during their evolution. However, the corresponding mass-loss rates are rather uncertain. To improve this, we calculated global line-driven wind models for Galactic B supergiants. Our models…
The massive evolved Wolf-Rayet stars sometimes occur in colliding-wind binary systems in which dust plumes are formed as a result of the collision of stellar winds. These structures are known to encode the parameters of the binary orbit and…
Massive Wolf-Rayet stars are recognized today to be in a very common, but short, evolutionary phase of massive stars. While our understanding of Wolf-Rayet stars has increased dramatically over the past decades, it remains unclear whether…
Wolf-Rayet stars embody the final stable phase of the most massive stars immediately before their evolution is terminated in a supernova explosion. They are responsible for some of the most extreme and energetic phenomena in stellar…
The first directly detected gravitational waves (GW 150914) were emitted by two coalescing black holes (BHs) with masses of ~36Msun and ~29Msun. Several scenarios have been proposed to put this detection into an astrophysical context. The…
Radial velocity studies of accreting binary stars commonly use accretion disk emission lines to determine the radial velocity of the primary star and therefore the mass ratio. These emission line radial velocity curves are often shifted in…
Double-lined spectroscopic binary systems, containing a Wolf-Rayet and a massive O-type star, are key objects for the study of massive star evolution because these kinds of systems allow the determination of fundamental astrophysical…
I review the process of mass transfer in a binary system through a stellar wind, with an emphasis on systems containing a red giant. I show how wind accretion in a binary system is different from the usually assumed Bondi-Hoyle…
Wolf-Rayet (WR) stars are the most advanced stage in the evolution of the most massive stars. The strong feedback provided by these objects and their subsequent supernova (SN) explosions are decisive for a variety of astrophysical topics…