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| Paper: |
Searching for Wolf-Rayet Stars in the Local Group |
| Volume: |
465, Four Decades of Massive Star Research - A Scientific Meeting in Honor of Anthony J. Moffat |
| Page: |
465 |
| Authors: |
Shara, M. M.; Zurek, D.; Kanarek, G.; Faherty, J. |
| Abstract: |
Tony Moffat has been inspiring the hunt for new Wolf-Rayet stars for over 40 years. These extraordinary objects offer critical tests of stellar evolution theory, and are predicted to be progenitors of type Ib and Ic supernovae. We're only going to know if that prediction is correct (in our lifetimes) by locating and spectrographically confirming of order 10 000 WR stars - a daunting but increasingly doable task. Our 2009 prediction that roughly 6 500 Wolf-Rayet stars live in our Galaxy has been followed by demonstrations in the past few years that, via narrowband infrared imaging and spectroscopy, we can find and confirm almost all Galactic WR stars. The rest of the Local Group is unlikely to contain more than 1 000 WR stars, so the Milky Way is THE place to search exhaustively for them. I briefly describe how we hunt and gather WR stars and give a current (mid-2011) Local Group census of them. |
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