FUSE Spectral Atlas of Wolf-Rayet Stars

Wolf-Rayet stars are the semi-evolved products of O main sequence stars: WN-types and WC Wolf-Rayet stars are, respectively, stars for which products of CNO processing and He-burning affect the surface composition and the emergent spectrum. The correct modeling of their spectra over all possible wavelength ranges is essential to an understanding of how massive stars evolve. Thus, the FUSE Wolf-Rayet atlas offers complementarity to the Pellerin and Walborn O-star atlases in this High-Level Science Products series. The atlas is taken from the paper by Willis et al. 2004. This paper presents full FUSE-wavelength coverage for 21 Wolf-Rayet stars distributed among WN and WC types and located in the Galaxy or either of the Magellanic Clouds. As in the previous O-star atlases, the emphasis in the companion paper (see Willis et al. 2005) and in the figures included herein is in the presentation of data for many resonance lines from ions spanning a wide range of ionization potential.

The data were obtained through the 30 X 30 arcsec (large) science aperture. The data have been processed beyond the pipeline stage to produce a single merged spectrum for each star. The post-processing steps include suppression of nightglow emission lines (by using only orbital-night data for these wavelengths), correction for the LiF1B channel "worm" by using "continuum" information from the LiF1A channel, use of guiding channel fluxes and generated errors to assign relative weights to fluxes in wavelength regions where channel data overlap, and a binning of the data to 0.1 Angstroms (15 pixels). The resulting spectra have a signal to noise in the range of 20 to 50 per wavelength bin. The wavelength scales of the spectra are heliocentric. No attempt has been made to rectify the stellar continuum fluxes.

Clicking on "Available Data" below brings the investigator to a table listing the star name, resident galaxy, spectral type, and a fits file. These data consist of wavelengths, fluxes, and errors located in the first extension of the binary fits table. The table is organized into subsections according to spectral type, and gif montage plots of spectra for stars in this subsection may be inspected by clicking the link at the header row.

Available Data

Copyright Statement: The data presented here will be published in the Astrophysical Journal Supplements. and appears with the permission of the American Astronomical Society and the author cited above. Reuse or redistribution of these data is subject to the copyright policies of the American Astronomical Society.