Speaker
Description
The most massive stars provide an essential source of recycled material for young clusters and galaxies. While very massive stars (VMS, $M>100 \,M_\odot$) are relatively rare compared to O stars, they lose disproportionately large amounts of mass already from the onset of core H-burning. In this talk, I will discuss the impact of stellar wind yields from VMS, calculated for a wide range of masses ($50-500\,M_\odot$) at solar metallicity, using the MESA stellar evolution code. We find that for VMS, $95\%$ of the total wind yields are produced already on the main sequence, while only $\sim 5\%$ is supplied by the post-main sequence. This implies that VMS are the primary source of ${}^{26}\mathrm{Al}$ and could be responsible for the observed Galactic ${}^{26}\mathrm{Al}$ enrichment. Interestingly, we find that $200\,M_\odot$ stars eject $100$ times more of each heavy element in their winds than $50\,M_\odot$ stars, and even when weighted by an IMF their wind contribution is still an order of magnitude higher than that of a $50\,M_\odot$ star.
