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The O stars: optical review∗

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 August 2015

J. B. Hutchings
J. B. Hutchings*
Affiliation:
Dominion Astrophysical Observatory, Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics, National Research Council Canada, Victoria, B.C.

Extract

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I would like to start with a quick overview of the O stars - their significance and role in the galaxy and in astrophysics - just to remind ourselves of why we are here and what we hope to talk about. In Table 1 I show a rough outline of the contribution of O stars to what happens in the galaxy as a whole. Because of their extreme luminosity, they contribute a large fraction of the radiation of the galaxy, while forming a very tiny group of objects and mass. Because of their short lifetime they are a population that has gone through 104 generations in the life of the galaxy. Their high mass loss rates may account for a large fraction of the new matter injected into the interstellar medium, and they probably power some significant fraction of the hard X-ray sources in the galaxy, by virtue of the fact that a companion can become a neutron star a) without disrupting the binary and b) while the companion is still a mass losing O star.

Type
Session 1: Optical Spectroscopy
Information
Symposium - International Astronomical Union , Volume 83: Mass Loss and Evolution of O-Type Stars , 1979 , pp. 1 - 22
Copyright
Copyright © Reidel 1979 

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