juliensimon/wolf-rayet-stars
Galactic Wolf-Rayet Stars Credit: NASA/ESA/Hubble Part of a dataset collection on Hugging Face. Dataset description Catalog of Galactic Wolf-Rayet stars — massive evolved stars with powerful stellar winds and broad emission lines. Wolf-Rayet stars represent a brief but spectacular late stage in the lives of the most massive stars (>25 solar masses), just before they explode as supernovae. Wolf-Rayet (WR) stars are among the hottest and most luminous stars… See the full description on the dataset page: https://huggingface.co/datasets/juliensimon/wolf-rayet-stars.
Galactic Wolf-Rayet Stars
<div align="center"> <img src="banner.jpg" alt="A youthful globular star cluster observed by the Hubble Space Telescope" width="400"> <p><em>Credit: NASA/ESA/Hubble</em></p> </div>
Part of a [dataset collection](https://huggingface.co/collections/juliensimon/astronomy-datasets-69c24caf2f17e36128946743) on Hugging Face.
Dataset description
Catalog of Galactic Wolf-Rayet stars — massive evolved stars with powerful stellar winds and broad emission lines. Wolf-Rayet stars represent a brief but spectacular late stage in the lives of the most massive stars (>25 solar masses), just before they explode as supernovae.
Wolf-Rayet (WR) stars are among the hottest and most luminous stars known, with surface temperatures of 30,000-200,000 K and luminosities up to a million times the Sun. Their spectra are dominated by broad emission lines from helium, nitrogen (WN subtype), carbon (WC subtype), or oxygen (WO subtype), produced by their extreme stellar winds losing mass at rates of 10^-5 solar masses per year.
This catalog is based on Rate & Crowther (2020), which combined the most complete census of Galactic WR stars with Gaia DR2 parallaxes to derive distances, luminosities, and spatial distribution. The dataset includes astrometric positions, spectral classifications, Gaia and infrared photometry, and distance estimates.
Wolf-Rayet stars represent a fleeting but critical phase in massive star evolution. Stars born with initial masses above roughly 25 solar masses shed their hydrogen envelopes through powerful radiation-driven winds and episodic mass loss, exposing first the products of CNO-cycle hydrogen burning (nitrogen-rich WN phase) and then the products of helium burning (carbon- and oxygen-rich WC/WO phases). Their powerful winds inject enormous mechanical energy and chemically enriched material into the surrounding interstellar medium, sculpting ring nebulae and contributing to Galactic chemical evolution.
Schema
Quick stats
- 380 Galactic Wolf-Rayet stars
- 220 WN (nitrogen sequence), 145 WC (carbon sequence), 4 WO (oxygen sequence)
- 64 spectroscopic binaries
- 380 with Gaia-based distance estimates (median 2.9 kpc)
- 96 with luminosity measurements
Usage
from datasets import load_dataset
ds = load_dataset("juliensimon/wolf-rayet-stars", split="train")
df = ds.to_pandas()
# WN vs WC distribution
print(df["wr_subtype"].value_counts())
# Nearest WR stars
nearest = df.nsmallest(10, "distance_kpc")[["wr_number", "spectral_type", "distance_kpc", "name"]]
print(nearest)
# Luminosity distribution by subtype
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
for st in ["WN", "WC"]:
sub = df[df["wr_subtype"] == st].dropna(subset=["log_luminosity"])
plt.hist(sub["log_luminosity"], bins=15, alpha=0.6, label=st)
plt.xlabel("log(L/L_sun)")
plt.ylabel("Count")
plt.legend()
plt.title("Wolf-Rayet Luminosity Distribution")
plt.show()Data source
https://vizier.cds.unistra.fr/viz-bin/VizieR-3?-source=J/MNRAS/493/1512
Related datasets
Citation
@dataset{wolf_rayet_stars,
title = {Galactic Wolf-Rayet Stars},
author = {Simon, Julien},
year = {2026},
url = {https://huggingface.co/datasets/juliensimon/wolf-rayet-stars},
publisher = {Hugging Face},
note = {Derived from VizieR, Centre de Données astronomiques de Strasbourg (CDS), https://vizier.cds.unistra.fr/viz-bin/VizieR-3?-source=J/MNRAS/493/1512}
}