A New Digital S Star Atlas and Its Uses

Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy

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Scientific paper

S and carbon (C) stars are traditionally thought to be on the asymptotic giant branch because of their high C/O ratios and enhanced s-process elements. A sample of S stars at high Galactic latitudes would help us understand their formation and evolution in disk to halo populations, at a variety of metallicities and with minimal reddening. Faint S stars would either be at large Galactocentric radii, or dwarfs. S dwarfs are in analogy to dwarf C stars, which are thought to originate from mass transfer in a binary system. Dwarf C stars are now known to be the numerically dominant type of C star in the Galaxy, but no S dwarfs have ever been found. Their discovery and knowledge of their space density could closely constrain some of the many available channels of binary evolution. The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) seems an ideal place to find faint S stars, but the colors of these stars are largely unknown, since all known S stars (median V magnitude of 10.5) are saturated in the SDSS. We use the FAST spectrograph on the Tillinghast reflector on Mt. Hopkins to obtain the spectra of 57 known S stars that appear in the Two-Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS). We flux calibrate these spectra, provide them electronically as a digital atlas, and convolve them with SDSS bandpasses to generate likely colors for S giants and dwarfs. We find that these S star colors are not clearly distinguished from the colors of M giants and C stars. We also present initial results of a cross-correlation with the SDSS spectral database, using the FAST spectra as templates. This work is supported in part by the NSF REU and DOD ASSURE programs under NSF grant no. 0754568 and by the Smithsonian Institution.

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