P33	November 1998

¹Space Research Organization Netherlands, Utrecht, The Netherlands
² Institut d'Astrophysique et de Géophysique - Université de Liège, Avenue de Cointe 5, 4000 Liège, Belgium
³ETHZ, Paul Scherrer Institute, Villigen, Switzerland
⁴ETH, Zürich, Switzerland
⁵School of Physics & Astronomy, Birmingham, United Kingdom
⁶Columbia Astrophysics Laboratory, USA


^* Chargé de Recherches FNRS, Belgium
^** Chercheur Qualifié FNRS, Belgium

Abstract

     We briefly review the current knowledge on X-ray emission from hot massive stars based on previous X-ray missions and we highlight the potential of the instrumentation on board XMM to achieve considerable progress in this field. To this aim, we consider the WN7+abs star WR25 that exhibits one of the largest X-ray emission excesses known among (apparently) single Wolf-Rayet stars. High resolution XMM-RGS spectra of this star will enable us to constrain the abundances of several chemical elements that play a key role in massive star evolution but for which no accurate abundance determinations are available from longer wavelength observations.