Environments of massive stars and the upper mass limit

Abstract

The locations of massive stars (> 8 Msun) within their host galaxies is reviewed. These range from distributed OB associations to dense star clusters within giant HII regions. A comparison between massive stars and the environments of core-collapse supernovae and long duration Gamma Ray Bursts is made, both at low and high redshift. We also address the question of the upper stellar mass limit, since very massive stars (VMS, Minit >> 100 Msun) may produce exceptionally bright core-collapse supernovae or pair instability supernovae.

9 pages, 2 figures, review paper from IAU Symposium 279: Death of Massive Stars: SNe and GRBs (P. Roming, N. Kawai & E. Pian, eds.)

References in corpus (8)

• Physical Properties of Wolf-Rayet Stars
• Long gamma-ray bursts and core-collapse supernovae have different environments
• The R136 star cluster hosts several stars whose individual masses greatly exceed the accepted 150 Msun stellar mass limit
• Long Gamma-Ray Bursts and Type Ic Core Collapse Supernovae Have Similar Locations in Hosts
• The Initial Mass Function of the Massive Star-forming Region NGC 3603 from Near-Infrared Adaptive Optics observations
• Converting H$\alpha$ Luminosities into Star Formation Rates
• The very massive binary NGC3603-A1
• The most massive core collapse supernova progenitors

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Instabilities in the Envelopes and Winds of Very Massive Stars