The Brightest Binaries

List of abbreviations. - Constants. - I: Massive Stars. - 1. Definition. - 2. General observations. - II: Massive Single Stars. - 3. The equations of stellar structure of a non-magnetic non-rotating single star. - 4. Evolutionary computations of non-rotating massive single stars. - 5. Comparison between observations and evolutionary computations of non-rotating single stars. - 6. The effect of rotation on the evolution of massive single stars. - III: Massive Close Binaries. - 7. General. - 8. The Roche model. - 9. The mass transfer process during RLOF. - 10. The evolution of the binary period in MCBs. - 11. The effect of the supernova explosion of one of the components. - 12. Evolutionary computations of massive close binaries. - 13. Massive binaries: observations. - 14. Comparison between the predicted evolution of MCBs and observations. - IV: Massive Star Population Number Synthesis. - 15. General. - 16. Observations used as input in a population model. - 17. The observations which need to be reproduced by a massive star population model. - 18. The population number synthesis (PNS) model. - 19. PNS model calculations. - Concluding remarks. - References. Language: English