A WC/WO star exploding within an expanding carbon-oxygen-neon nebula

Understand

The final explosive fate of massive stars, and the nature of the compact remnants they leave behind (black holes and neutron stars), are major open questions in astrophysics.

• Many massive stars are stripped of their outer hydrogen envelopes as they evolve.
• Such Wolf-Rayet (W-R) stars emit strong and rapidly expanding (v_wind>1000 km/s) winds indicating a high escape velocity from the stellar surface.
• A fraction of this population is also helium depleted, with spectra dominated by highly-ionized emission lines of carbon and oxygen (Types WC/WO).