Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astrophysics
Scientific paper
2008-08-18
MNRAS: Vol 390, 2008, Page 929
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astrophysics
18 pages, 20 figures, published in MNRAS. Minor text changes and Figure 17 replaced
Scientific paper
10.1111/j.1365-2966.2008.13851.x
We present photometric analysis and follow-up spectroscopy for a population of extremely red stellar objects extracted from the point-source catalogue of the INT Photometric H-Alpha Survey (IPHAS) of the northern galactic plane. The vast majority of these objects have no previous identification. Analysis of optical, near- and mid-infrared photometry reveals that they are mostly highly-reddened asymptotic giant branch stars, with significant levels of circumstellar material. We show that the distribution of these objects traces galactic extinction, their highly reddened colours being a product of both interstellar and circumstellar reddening. This is the first time that such a large sample of evolved low-mass stars has been detected in the visual and allows optical counterparts to be associated with sources from recent infrared surveys. Follow-up spectroscopy on some of the most interesting objects in the sample has found significant numbers of S-type stars which can be clearly separated from oxygen-rich objects in the IPHAS colour-colour diagram. We show that this is due to the positions of different molecular bands relative to the narrow-band H-alpha filter used for IPHAS observations. The IPHAS (r' - H-alpha) colour offers a valuable diagnostic for identifying S-type stars. A selection method for identifying S-type stars in the galactic plane is briefly discussed and we estimate that over a thousand new objects of this type may be discovered, potentially doubling the number of known objects in this short but important evolutionary phase.
Barlow Michael J.
Cioni M.-R. L.
Corradi Romano L. M.
Drew Janet E.
Gonzalez-Solares Eduardo A.
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