Westerlund 1 is a Galactic Treasure Chest: The Wolf-Rayet Stars
Abstract
The Westerlund 1 Galactic cluster hosts an eclectic mix of coeval massive stars. At a modest distance of 4-5 kpc, it offers a unique opportunity to study the resolved stellar content of a young (~5 Myr) high mass (5.104 M ⊙) star cluster. With the aim of testing single-star evolutionary predictions, and revealing any signatures of binary evolution, we discuss on-going analyses of NTT/SOFI near-IR spectroscopy of Wolf-Rayet stars in Westerlund 1. We find that late WN stars are H-poor compared to their counterparts in the Milky Way field, and nearly all are less luminous than predicted by single-star Geneva isochrones at the age of Westerlund 1.
- Publication:
-
New Windows on Massive Stars
- Pub Date:
- January 2015
- DOI:
- Bibcode:
- 2015IAUS..307..135R
- Keywords:
-
- stars: early-type;
- mass loss;
- Wolf-Rayet;
- infrared: stars;
- galaxies: star clusters