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| Paper: |
Very Massive Stars with the Habitable Worlds Observatory |
| Monograph: |
10, HWO25 Proceedings Part I: Community Science Case Development Documents |
| Page: |
37 |
| Authors: |
Fabrice Martins; Aida Wofford; Miriam Garcia; Peter Senchyna; Janice Lee; Paul A. Scowen |
| DOI: |
10.26624/BYDH3083 |
| Abstract: |
Very massive stars (VMS) are defined as stars with an initial mass in excess of 100 M⊙. Because of their
short lifetime and the shape of the stellar mass function, they are rare objects. Only about twenty of them are
known in the Galaxy and the Large Magellanic Cloud. However VMS are important in several ways. They
efficiently spread nucleosynthesis products through their boosted stellar winds, they are predicted to explode
as pair-instability supernovae or to form heavy black-holes from direct collapse, and they outshine all other
types of stars in the ultraviolet light, thus dominating the integrated light of starbursts. Their presence is
indirectly suspected across all redshifts, all the way to cosmic dawn where they may have played a key role
in the formation of the first galaxies. Their search and identification is currently hampered by instrumental
limitation, especially spatial resolution. An integral field spectrograph working at the diffraction limit of
HWO (5 mas) and with a spectral resolution of about 2000 would revolutionize the understanding of VMS.
We make the case for such an instrument in this contribution. |
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