A hidden population of Wolf-Rayet stars in the massive galactic cluster Westerlund 1

A hidden population of Wolf-Rayet stars in the massive galactic cluster Westerlund 1

We report the discovery of a hitherto undetected population of Wolf-Rayet stars in the young galactic open cluster Westerlund 1. Optical spectroscopy of the cluster identified 11 such objects; provisional classification suggests that 6 are nitrogen rich (WN) and 5 carbon rich (WC). Including the previously identified Blue, Yellow & Red Super& Hypergiants, Westerlund 1 clearly has a very rich po...

Further Wolf-Rayet stars in the starburst cluster Westerlund 1

We present new low and intermediate-resolution spectroscopic observations of the Wolf Rayet (WR) star population in the massive starburst cluster Westerlund 1. Finding charts are presented for five new WRs – four WNL and one WCL – raising the current total of known WRs in the cluster to 19. We also present new spectra and correct identifications for the majority of the 14 WR stars previously kn...

Searching for hidden Wolf-Rayet stars in the Galactic Plane – 15 new Wolf-Rayet stars

We report the discovery of fifteen previously unknown Wolf-Rayet (WR) stars found as part of an infrared broad-band study of candidate WR stars in the Galaxy. We have derived an empirically-based selection algorithm which has selected ∼5000 WR candidate stars located within the Galactic Plane drawn from the GLIMPSE (midinfrared) and 2MASS (near-infrared) catalogues. Spectroscopic follow-up of 1...

Detection of additional Wolf - Rayet stars in the starburst cluster Westerlund 1 with SOAR ⋆

We report the detection of 3 additional Wolf-Rayet stars in the young cluster Westerlund 1. They were selected as emission-line star candidates based on 1μm narrow-band imaging of the cluster carried out at OPD/LNA (Brazil), and then confirmed as Wolf-Rayet stars by K-band spectroscopy performed at the 4.1 m SOAR telescope (Chile). Together with previous works, this increases the population of ...

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