Thick Winds from Wolf-Rayet Stars

When the effective opacity becomes sufficiently great, a qualitatively different type of radiatively driven wind solution appears, in which a high wind thickness and trapping of radiation cause each other in a bootstrap fashion. It is proposed that the thick winds from Wolf-Rayet stars can be understood in this manner. Opacity computations using the method of super transition arrays (STA) are presented that show that outflows from WR stars can attain the needed opacities.