event
Wednesday 03 Nov 2010: The most massive stars in the Universe
Dr. Jorick Vink - Armagh Observatory, UK
Physics, 4th Floor interaction area 12:00-13:00
Whilst very massive stars with 100+ solar masses have been claimed to exist in the very early Universe, recent studies have suggested both the existence and deaths of stars up to 300 solar masses in the local Universe, which came as a surprise to many workers both inside and outside the field. Do such stars suffer extreme mass loss ending their lives as normal Wolf-Rayet stars? Or do they explode prematurely during the LBV phase? Or might they even give rise to pair-instability SNe? In order to address these questions, I discuss our latest mass-loss predictions using a novel hydrodynamic method that includes the important effects of multiple-photon interactions, predicting the rate of mass loss and the wind terminal velocity simultaneously.