Wolf-Rayet star
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Wolf-Rayet stars are evolved, hot, massive stars, that have very strong stellar winds. Wolf-Rayet stars are a normal stage in the evolution of massive stars, in which strong, broad emission lines of helium and nitrogen ("WN" sequence] or helium, carbon, and nitrogen ("WC" sequence) are visible. Because of their strong emission lines, they are relatively easy to identify in nearby galaxies. About 200 Wolf-Rayets are known in our own Milky Way Galaxy, and about 100 are known in the Large Cloud of Magellan. Only 12 have been identified in the Small Magellanic Cloud. Wolf-Rayet stars were discovered spectroscopically in 1867 by the French astronomers Charles Wolf and Georges Rayet using a visual spectrometery at Paris Observatory.
Other resources
External Links
- Images of Pinwheel Nebulae (http://www.physics.usyd.edu.au/~gekko/wr104.html) around Wolf-Rayet binaries from Aperture Masking Interferometry observations
References
- [1] (http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/~pberlind/atlas/htmls/wrstars.html)
- [2] (http://adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-bib_query?bibcode=2003ARA%26A..41...15M&db_key=AST&high=415a1c5c0f13275)de:Wolf-Rayet-Stern
es:Estrellas de Wolf-Rayet fr:Étoile Wolf-Rayet it:Stella di Wolf-Rayet nl:Wolf-Rayetster ja:ウォルフ・ライエ星 sv:Wolf-Rayet-stjärna