| Description: | Most people associate the WSRT (as they do for other radiotelescopes) with observations of galaxies and of pulsars. However, a small fraction of the observingtime is used to study "normal" stars in our Milky Way. On February 7, Roald Schnerr has defended his PhD thesis at The University of Amsterdam. The title of his thesis is "Magnetic fields and mass loss in massive stars". One chapter in this thesis discusses radio observations of a sample of O stars done with the WSRT. Non-thermal radio emission from these objects would most likely be due to synchrotron radiation. As a magnetic field is required for the production of synchrotron radiation, this would be strong evidence for the presence of a magnetic field in these stars. The figure shows the radio spectra of 5 sources, three of these stars show a non-thermal spectrum and hence are likely to have a magnetic field. For the complete thesis, see http://staff.science.uva.nl/~rschnerr/papers/thesis.pdf |
