Abstract
Wolf-Rayet (WR) stars are thought to be massive stars which are burning helium in their centers and have lost all or most of their hydrogen rich envelope, consequently showing products of hydrogen burning (WN stars) or helium burning (WC stars) at their surface. The very intense stellar wind of those objects (M W R > 10-5 M ⊙ yr -1) is responsible for the dominance of emission lines in their spectra, which is their most prominent characteristic. All massive single stars with initial masses above a certain limit M W R are supposed to evolve into WR stars, which represents their final hydrostatic evolutionary stage (cf. Chiosi and Maeder, 1986). Note that M W R , which is of the order of 25 – 50 M ⊙ in our Galaxy (van der Hucht et al., 1988; Humphreys et al., 1985), may depend on the stellar metallicity (cf. Dopita, this volume).
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