on the physical characteristics of Wolf-Rayet Stars

Abstract

The Wolf-Rayet stars form a group of objects that have numerous peculiar features in their spectra. They are so named after their discoverers Wolf and Rayet of the Paris Observatory who first picked out three examples of such spectra around the middle of the last century. Later, during the century, numerous additional discoveries, by visual methods as well as by the newly developed technique of objective prism photography, increased the list considerably. We thus have available today a fairly complete survey beyond magnitude 11'0 both in our galaxy as well as the nearby Magellanic clouds. Such a survey indicates that these objects are rare among the different celestial species commonly found in the vicinity of the sun.