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Abstract :
[en] This work is devoted to the study of the interactions of massive stars with their environment, either through their intense radiation fields or through their powerful stellar winds. First, we have studied the close neighbourhood of the peculiar Of?p star HD108, i.e. its stellar wind and associated emissions. We have notably uncovered the important variations of the emission lines seen in the visible domain. At the same time, in contrast, the X-ray emission remained stable. To better understand the X-rays emitted by the star, we have developed a program for modelling the ionisation of the stellar wind, that enabled us to determine the absorption of this ionised wind in the X-ray domain. Our X-ray observations have then permitted us to discard several models proposed to explain the nature of the system, and we have discussed the remaining possibilities in the light of the behaviour of the two other Of?p stars, the possible ``twins" of HD108. The wind modelling program was also used to study the properties, in the X-ray range, of the Wolf-Rayet star WR40: combined to the observations taken by XMM-Newton, we have shown that the non-detection of X-rays from this star can be explained by the very large opacity of its wind. The study of the ionisation of the surrounding gas by Wolf-Rayet stars was extended through the analysis of HeII nebulae. For the first time, high quality images of the highly excited regions surrounding Wolf-Rayet stars were taken and analysed, enabling to derive the extreme UV flux of these stars, and thus their temperature, from ground-based observations. In addition to the ionisation by massive stars, the impact of their stellar winds was also considered in this work, especially the wind-blown structures called ``bubbles''. These bubbles arise from the action of the winds of massive stars, in isolation or in clusters, onto the interstellar medium. We first focused on the bubbles blown by isolated stars, and we started by the study of the high energy properties of the bubble blown by WR40. Thanks to XMM-Newton data, we showed that even the most recent theoretical models cannot account for the lack of X-ray emission of this bubble. To better understand the discrepancies between the theory and the observations of wind-blown bubbles, we then turned to the most simple structures, the ones blown by single main sequence massive stars. Several bubbles have been discovered in N11B, N180B, and N44, and their properties agree better with theoretical expectations than in the case of WR bubbles and superbubbles. Before our study, only a few interstellar bubbles were known: we showed that a simple morphological search was insufficient, and that kinematic studies were essential. In fact, the low-velocity expansion of these bubbles implies a weak compression of the gas, that can inhibit the morphological detection. Finally, we investigated the properties of the interaction of massive star clusters with their surroundings in the high-energy range. The clusters of N11 were observed in X-rays and UV thanks to the XMM-Newton satellite: their differences or similarities appear clearly at these energies, and we note that the diffuse X-ray emission always exceeded the expected level. Moreover, a unique dataset composed of Chandra and XMM-Newton observations enabled us to study the largest star formation region of the Small Magellanic Cloud, NGC346. Notably, the X-ray emissions from the NGC346 cluster itself and from the peculiar WR binary system HD5980 were discovered and analysed in details. Our work underlines the complementarity between the visible, UV and X-ray domains, and the necessity to have observatories on the ground as well as in space. It also illustrates the important contribution of multiwavelength datasets to the study of massive stars. These observations indeed play a crucial role in the determination of the properties of early-type stars but they also provide critical tests for theoretical models (present or future).
