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List of Wolf–Rayet stars

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionAug 1, 2026
Entity authorityQ130271366 ↗
Source-derived summary

Wolf–Rayet stars, often abbreviated as WR stars, are a rare heterogeneous set of stars with unusual spectra showing prominent broad emission lines of ionised helium and highly ionised nitrogen or carbon. The spectra indicate very high surface enhancement of heavy elements, depletion of hydrogen, and strong stellar winds. The surface temperatures of known Wolf–Rayet stars range from 20,000 K to around 210,000 K, hotter than almost all other kinds of stars. They were previously called W-type stars referring to their spectral classification at that time.

This is a list of Wolf-Rayet stars, in order of their distance from Earth

List

Milky Way Galaxy

Magellanic Clouds

The Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) is around 163 kly distant and the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) is around 204 kly distant.

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“List of Wolf–Rayet stars” enters the record as wikimedia list article. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what List, Wolf and Rayet can confirm, complicate or overturn.

Editorial reviewA practical starting point whose main value is the path it opens into stronger specialist and primary sources. The current 126-word lead offers orientation but no explicit four-digit date, so chronology should not be assumed. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. Its strongest next move is a source search built around List, Wolf and Rayet.
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“List of Wolf–Rayet stars” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, List, Wolf and Rayet provides the most credible route into that argument.

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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q130271366. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.

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This entry incorporates text from “List of Wolf–Rayet stars” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.