This binary pair of a W-R star and a massive
O-type star, both shedding prodigious amounts of mass from hugely active stellar winds, made a superb illustration of the dynamic nature of Wolf-Rayet stars in general.
Chris Evans (Royal Observatory, Edinburgh) and colleagues found that VFTS 016 emits one of the strongest stellar winds known for an
O-type star, implying that it's roughly 90 solar masses.
Their data revealed that protostars within 0.1 light-year (about 600 billion miles) of an
O-type star are doomed to have their cocoons of dust and gas stripped away in just a few millions years, much faster than planets are able to form.
It has a spectroscopic companion, an
O-type star, orbiting in 33 days.
Andres Guzman (University of Chile and HarvardSmithsonian Center for Astrophysics) and colleagues took a closer look at another protostar, the future
O-type star dubbed G345.4938+01.4677 (G345 for short), using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) high in Chile's Atacama Desert.
Its spectral fingerprints match those of an evolved
O-type star, the duo reported in the April 20th Astrophysical Journal.
Also known as Naos, Zeta is an exceptionally hot
O-type star with a surface temperature of about 42,000[degrees]C (75,000 [degrees]F) and an estimated distance of 1,400 light-years.
The bluish star that dominates this narrowband image (to the north, or upper right, of center) is S Monocerotis, a variable
O-type star. Stars only a few million years old, like S Mon, make up the Christmas Tree Cluster.
The brighter star itself, however, turns out to be a binary that we can't resolve through our telescopes--if we could, we would see a hot
O-type star and a Wolf-Rayet star.
It's a binary system in which a hot
O-type star orbits the hotter, more luminous Wolf-Rayet primary.
He also demonstrated theoretically that they must reside within a third of a light-year of a very hot
O-type star for their ice mantles to evaporate.