Abundances of massive stars: some recent developments


Thierry Morel

Institut d'Astrophysique et de Geophysique, Liege University, Belgium

Thanks to their usefulness in various fields of astrophysics (e.g. mixing processes in stars, chemical evolution of galaxies), the last few years have witnessed a large increase in the amount of abundance data for early-type stars. Two intriguing results emerging since the last reviews on this topic will be discussed: (a) nearby OB stars exhibit metal abundances generally lower than the solar/meteoritic estimates; (b) evolutionary models of single objects including rotation are largely unsuccessful in explaining the CNO properties of stars in the Galaxy and in the Magellanic clouds.

Reference: Invited review presented at 'Evolution and Pulsation of Massive Stars
on the Main Sequence and Close to it' (Liege, July 2008).
To appear in Communications in Asteroseismology.
Status: Conference proceedings

Weblink: http://www.astro.ulg.ac.be/~morel/preprints.html

Comments: 8 pages and 7 colour figures.

Email: morel@astro.ulg.ac.be