Red Supergiants in the Andromeda Galaxy (M31)

Details Red Supergiants in the Andromeda Galaxy (M31) Red Supergiants in the Andromeda Galaxy (M31)

Jan 2009

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2009aas...21340701m&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #213, #407.01; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 41, p.202

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

Scientific paper

Red supergiants (RSGs) are the He-burning descendants of moderately massive (10-40 Mo) stars. Although they are not the most massive or bolometrically luminous, they are the physically largest stars in the universe, and their high luminosities and red colors result in their dominating the integrated NIR light of low redshift starbursts. Their high visual luminosities (Mv=-6 to -9) put them within reach for detailed studies within the Local Group and beyond.
For years the location of these stars in the HRD has been at variance with stellar evolutionary theory, with the "observed" locations more luminous and cooler than theory allow. Our group has recently revised the effective temperature scale of RSGs in the Milky Way and Magellanic Clouds using the new generation of MARCS stellar atmospheres (Levesque et al. 2005, 2006), resulting in excellent agreement in the Milky Way and LMC, and moderately good agreement in the SMC.
Here we extend this work to RSGs in the Andromeda Galaxy, M31. The metallicity of M31 is 2x solar, allowing us to now compare the physical properties of RSGS to that of evolution models at high metallicity. The sample was photometrically selected from the recent Local Group Galaxy Survey (Massey et al 2006, 2007), with membership confirmed by radial velocities obtained at WIYN. Optical spectrophotometry was obtained of a small subsample (17) of these objects using the mighty MMT 6.5-m. We also obtained contemporaneous V-K photometry using the Lowell Perkins 1.8-m telescope and the Mayall 4-m. The resulting distribution of stars in the HRD is shown, along with a comparison of their physical properties with lower metallicity RSGs.
This work was supported by the NSF through AST-0604569.

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