Peering into the Wolf-Rayet phenomenon through WO and WC stars

ABSTRACT Spectroscopic observations have shown for decades that the Wolf–Rayet (WR) phenomenon is ubiquitous among stars with different initial masses. Although much effort to understand the winds from massive WR stars has been presented in the literature, not much has been done for such type of stars in the low-mass range. Here we present an attempt to understand the winds from WR-type stars using results from spectral analyses with the full non-local thermodynamic equilibrium stellar atmosphere code PoWR. These results are put into context with the properties of massive WR stars. We found that WC + WC stars and WO + WO stars create independent sequences in the mass-loss rate (Ṁ) and modified wind momentum (Dmom) versus luminosity (L) diagrams. Our analysis indicates that even when the winds of WR and WR stars become optically thin, there is no breakdown of the general mass-loss trend, contrary to the observed ‘weak wind phenomenon’ in OB stars. We report that all WR-type stars studied here broadly define single sequences in the wind efficiency (η) versus transformed mass-loss rate (Ṁₜ), the Ṁₜ–Teff diagram, and the (L, Tₑff, Ṁ) space, which suggest these to be fundamental properties of the WR phenomenon (regardless of the mass range), at least for WR-type stars of the O and C sequences. Our analytical estimations could drive computations of future stellar evolution models for WR-type stars.