MULTILINE TRANSFER AND THE DYNAMICS OF WOLF-RAYET WINDS

A Monte Carlo technique for treating multiline transfer in stellar winds is extended to permit the modeling of the dense and highly stratified winds of Wolf-Rayet stars. Radiatively driven solutions are reported for parameters representing a typical WN5 star, and these have mass-loss rates that exceed the single-scattering limit by factors congruent-to 10. The basic physical effect allowing such high mass-loss rates is the highly effective photon trapping brought about by the strong stratification of ionization, which, in the form of the inverse correlation between line width and ionization potential, is an observed phenomenon for both the WN and WC sequences. As a result of photon trapping, approximately 5% of the photon luminosity in the WN5 models is converted into corpuscular luminosity.