X-shooting ULLYSES: massive stars at low metallicity

Context. Current implementations of mass loss for hot, massive stars in stellar evolution models usually include a sharp increase in mass loss when blue supergiants become cooler than Teff ∼ 20−22kK. Such a drastic mass-loss jump has traditionally been motivated by the potential presence of a so-called bistability ionisation effect, which may occur for line-driven winds in this temperature region due to recombination of important line-driving ions.

Aims. We perform quantitative spectroscopy using UV (ULLYSES program) and optical (XShootU collaboration) data for 17 OBsupergiant stars in the LMC (covering the range Teff ∼ 14−32kK), deriving absolute constraints on global stellar, wind, and clumping parameters. We examine whether there are any empirical signs of a mass-loss jump in the investigated region, and we study the clumped nature of the wind.

Methods. We used a combination of the model atmosphere code fastwind and the genetic algorithm (GA) code Kiwi-GA to fit synthetic spectra of a multitude of diagnostic spectral lines in the optical and UV.

Results. We find an almost monotonic decrease of mass-loss rate with effective temperature, with no signs of any upward mass loss jump anywhere in the examined region. Standard theoretical comparison models, which include a strong bistability jump thus severely overpredict the empirical mass-loss rates on the cool side of the predicted jump. Another key result is that across our sample we find that on average about 40% of the total wind mass seems to reside in the more diluted medium in between dense clumps.

Conclusions. Our derived mass-loss rates suggest that for applications such as stellar evolution one should not include a drastic bistability jump in mass loss for stars in the temperature and luminosity region investigated here. The derived high values of interclump density further suggest that the common assumption of an effectively void interclump medium (applied in the vast majority of spectroscopic studies of hot star winds) is not generally valid in this parameter regime.