The Physical Parameters of Red Supergiants: When Massive Stars Are as Cool as They Get

Details The Physical Parameters of Red Supergiants: When Massive Stars Are as Cool as They Get The Physical Parameters of Red Supergiants: When Massive Stars Are as Cool as They Get

Aug 2005

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2005noao.prop..200m&link_type=abstract

NOAO Proposal ID #2005B-0200

Computer Science

Scientific paper

Red supergiants (RSGs) are an important but poorly characterized stage in the evolution of massive stars. In the past, evolutionary models did not reproduce the ``observed" location of RSGs in the H-R diagram. However, our recent study using the new MARCS atmospheric models to fit spectrophotometry of Galactic RSGs has now led to good agreement between theory and observations (Levesque et al. 2005). With time generously granted by the TAC last year, we attempted to extend this study to the lower metallicity RSGs in the Magellanic Clouds, where the distribution of spectral types is quite different than that of the Milky Way (Elias et al. 1985; Massey & Olsen 2003). Unfortunately, our run was haunted by a ``grating ghost", rendering the observations in the near-UV and blue useless for our purposes, although good data were obtained in the red. We are now requesting time to complete these observations, using the last semester for which the RC Spectrograph is likely to be available. (The observations cannot be done with SOAR since the Goodman HTS lacks both a suitable grating and a blue-sensitive chip.) Reliable spectrophotometry in the blue is critical for deriving the effective temperatures, comparing the atomic lines Ca I(lambda) 4226 and Ca II H and K to the models, and in investigating the presence of peculiar reddening around these stars, presumably due to circumstellar dust.

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