The Wolf-Rayet Stars and Mass Loss

Wolf-Rayet stars are defined, a summary is given of the properties of Wolf-Rayet stars, and a qualitative model of a Wolf-Rayet star is sketched. It is incontrovertible that Wolf-Rayet stars are losing mass, a typical rate of mass loss being near 10−5M⊙ per year. The outward directed velocity of the expanding shell has been estimated for 10 stars. The largest value found is 2500 km/sec; most values lie between 1000 and 1500 km/sec. Two outstanding problems are to understand how the observed high velocities are generated and to demonstrate quantitatively the effect of these velocities on the observed spectrum. Five questions raised by the fact that mass loss is observed to take place from Wolf-rayet stars are discussed briefly in Section 5.