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ABSTRACT

Stothers 1966

Stothers, R., 1966: The semiconvective zone in very massive stars. Astrophys. J., 144, 959-967.

Models are constructed for very massive stars in the range 45-1000 M during hydrogen burning in order to examine the role of convective instability. The semiconvective zone shows a massive growth (in mass fraction) at about 60 M, with a chosen initial hydrogen abundance of X = 0.70. Sixty solar masses is also the maximum mass fraction found by Schwarzschild and Härm to be stable against radial pulsations for nearly the same chemical composition. Radiation pressure has a crticial destabilizing influence here. In the limit of the highest masses, the semiconvective zone disappears toward the surface, but the star still evolves inhomogeneously. It is shown that asymptotic limits at core-hydrogen exhaustion exist for the mass fraction of the convective core, the mean hydrogen content, and the hydrogen-burning lifetime.

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