"The project ""StarlightWinds"" was executed at Centro de Astrobiologia, Madrid, Spain, and witnessed progress in general accordance with the original plan. However, on Sep. 30 2016 the project was terminated early (original project running until June 2017), since the fellow (Prof. Dr. Jon O. Sundqvist) had been offered, and accepted, a position as Asst. Professor (""tenure track"" professor/docent) at KU Leuven, Belgium. The former fellow is thus working at KU Leuven at the present, where his current position as Asst. Prof. after 5 years is intended to transform into tenure and a permanent professorship (following standard procedures for evaluation of such academic tenure tracks). As such, the action has fulfilled and highlighted principal aims of the Marie Sklodowska-Curie individual fellowship: creating strong and invaluable collaborations between scientific institutes within the European Union (CAB and KU Leuven) and -- perhaps even more important -- advanced significantly the professional career of the fellow (now Prof. Sundqvist).
Prof. Sundqvist and his former group at CAB are still working closely together, though, and several peer-reviewed research articles with the former fellow as co-author have also already been published (6 such papers in which the current Marie-Curie project 656725 has been acknowledged have already appeared in the literature, and several more are underway, see further below). Moreover, several beneficial synergy effects and collaborations have been initiated, as the fellow has actively participated in the various activities in the research-group led by previous project supervisor Dr. F. Najarro at CAB in Madrid. For example, at the present Dr. Najarro's PhD student M. Rubio is conducting the final parts of her thesis (expected to be finished summer 2017), and Prof. Sundqvist has since his first arrival to Madrid been highly involved in Ms. Rubio's work; as such, he gained plenty of invaluable experience as mentor and co-supervisor during his time in Madrid, preparing him very well for his current teaching and supervising duties as professor at KU Leuven.
More specifically, during our time at CAB we have delivered a new, significantly improved generation of radiation-hydrodynamic, steady-state wind simulations of hot star wind. These models now include two critical physics components neglected in earlier generations, and first results of them indeed show systematically lower mass-loss rates compared to the current standard predictions included in stellar evolution calculations. First observational results carried out by M. Rubio at CAB, together with former fellow Sundqvist and supervisor Najarro, seem to support such general reduction of mass-loss rates. A cornerstone-paper about these findings is currently being written (led by Sundqvist, in close collaboration with former project-supervisor F. Najarro at CAB), and will be submitted to a peer-review journal shortly. Simultaneously, PhD candidate Rubio leads the writing-up of the corresponding empirical results. What is already clear though, is that these mass-loss rate reductions potentially will have quite dramatic consequences for both massive-star evolution models and the many other astronomical applications that rely on a firm understanding of the lives and deaths of such massive stars."
