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See an example of a Wolf-Rayet Star

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Wolf-Rayet stars represent a final stage of evolution for massive stars, where they have lost their outer atmosphere due to either binary interactions or through stellar winds. As such, direct measurements of stellar masses are an ideal way to test stellar/binary evolution. To date, only a few carbon-rich Wolf-Rayet stars have resolved orbits through long-baseline optical interferometry. We present the first results on WR133 (WN5 + O9I) with the CHARA Array. We resolved the binary (P=112 d) in July 2019 with the MIRCX combiner, with a separation of 0.9 mas, moving about 2-3 degrees per day. We have collected three more snapshots since the discovery and will present a preliminary orbit, constrained by a previously published spectroscopic orbit this January at the AAS meeting.
Eclipsing Binary Solar Masses
I completed a Senior Research Thesis course where I am working directly with Dr. Noel Richardson. My research was over the first visual orbit for a WN star. Within this research, I was tasked with reading in our data through Python and fitting the orbital constraints based on our observations with the WN star. I analyzed several spectrographs in order to measure the radial velocities in the system, allowing us to calculate the masses.

 

Our efforts resulted in a very gratifying accomplishment: the first-ever visually observed orbit of a Nitrogen-rich Wolf-Rayet (WN) star.

 

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