Mass loss from OB-stars

TL;DR

This review discusses radiation-driven mass loss in OB-stars, comparing theoretical predictions with observations, and addresses challenges like weak winds and wind clumping that impact our understanding of stellar evolution.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of recent developments, highlighting the importance of clumping and metallicity effects, and explores new modeling approaches to better estimate mass-loss rates.

Findings

Clumping can cause overestimates of mass-loss rates by factors of 2 to 10.

Near-infrared Br-alpha line offers a promising diagnostic for weak winds.

Moderate reductions in mass-loss rates are possible with advanced clumping models.

Abstract

We review recent developments regarding radiation driven mass loss from OB-stars. We first summarize the fundamental theoretical predictions, and then compare these to observational results (including the VLT-FLAMES survey of massive stars). Especially we focus on the mass loss-metallicity dependence and on the so-called bi-stability jump. Subsequently we concentrate on two urgent problems, weak winds and wind clumping, that have been identified from various diagnostics and that challenge our present understanding of radiation driven winds. We discuss the problems of ``measuring'' mass-loss rates from weak winds and the potential of the near infrared, Br-alpha line as a tool to enable a more precise quantification, and comment on physical explanations for mass-loss rates that are much lower than predicted by the standard model. Wind clumping, conventionally interpreted as the consequence of a strong instability inherent to radiative line-driving, has severe implications for the interpretation of observational diagnostics, since derived mass-loss rates are usually overestimated when clumping is present but ignored in the analyses. Simplified techniques to account for clumping indicate overestimates by factors of 2 to 10, or even more. If actually true, these results would have a dramatic impact on the evolution of, and the feedback from, massive stars. We discuss ongoing attempts (including own work) to interprete the corresponding observations in terms of more sophisticated models. By allowing for porosity in density and velocity space, and for a non-void inter-clump medium, such models might require only moderate reductions of mass-loss rates.