Roel Lefever (Belgium)
roel.lefever @ uni-heidelberg.de
A dynamically consistent Analysis of Wolf-Rayet Stars in different Environments
Massive stars, despite their low numbers, have a profound impact on their stellar surroundings as their radiation blows away large amounts of material into their environment, in a process called the stellar wind. For a subset of the massive stars - the Wolf-Rayet stars - this behaviour becomes particularly extreme: their stellar winds are so powerful that the sheer amount of expelled material effectively renders the star itself invisible. Only the stellar wind material can be observed by us.
If we want to know anything about these stars - believed to be the direct progenitors of stellar-mass black holes - we then need to know how the radiation emitted by the star travels through the stellar wind material.
Observations and models of these stars show multiple deficiencies, raising the need for more detailed stellar wind modelling of these stars.
We will do this by consistently modelling the dynamics of the stellar wind together with the transfer of radiation through the winds of Wolf-Rayet stars, combined with detailed comparison with observed Wolf-Rayet stars.
Supervisor: Andreas Sander (ARI)
