Abstract

Poster - Splinter HotStars

The formation of the observed Wolf-Rayet stars in the Magellanic Clouds is not dominated by mass transfer in binaries

T. Shenar^1
1Institut für Physik und Astronomie, Universität Potsdam, Karl-Liebknecht-Str. 24/25, D-14476 Potsdam, Germany

Classical Wolf-Rayet (WR) stars are evolved, hydrogen-poor stars characterized by powerful, radiation-driven stellar winds. Massive stars reach the WR phase after having shed much material via either stellar winds or mass-transfer in binary systems. Current evolutionary models predict that the majority of WR stars at the low metallicity environments of the Magellanic Cloud form via mass-transfer in binaries. Using the PoWR code, we performed a non-LTE spectral analysis of the complete population of Wolf-Rayet binaries in the Small and Large Magellanic Clouds (SMC and LMC), testing mass-luminosity relations against orbital masses, and constraining evolutionary channels for each system using the BPASS and BONNSAI tools. A comparison with evolutionary tracks reveals that, while mass-transfer in binaries may have played a role in their detailed evolution, it does not dominate the formation of WR stars in the Magellanic clouds.