Other
Scientific paper
May 2011
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2011aas...21823103m&link_type=abstract
American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #218, #231.03; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 43, 2011
Other
Scientific paper
Surveys along the Galactic plane at red and infrared wavelengths -- e.g. several objective-prism surveys in the photographic infrared, and the recent Spitzer/GLIMPSE survey in the 3-8μ region -- record large numbers of faint red stars. Some of these sources must be distant, heavily-reddened supergiants in remote spiral arms, and they would be valuable tracers if their distances could be estimated. Measurement of a TiO band and a color index -- show that the majority of the detected faint, red sources are stars of type M, reddened to different degrees. It is more difficult to distinguish bona fide supergiants from the more common giants (which are also likely to be reddened, but are not confined to spiral arms), and to obtain the luminosity classes needed for the determination of individual distances. We have developed two methods, one using slit spectroscopy and the other narrow-band photometry, for determining the luminosities of reddened M stars. Both methods depend primarily on the measurement of CN absorption in the 0.8μ region, often in the face of much stronger TiO bands. The spectroscopic method involves flattening the digital spectra and comparing program stars to standards of the same TiO strength to judge the amount of CN present. The narrow-band method involves fitting a blackbody curve to the calibrated photometry and defining a reddening-free CN index. This CN absorption is measurable in all giants and supergiants of types K and M and is stronger in supergiants. In fact, young, massive supergiants of classes Ia and Iab, which should be excellent spiral-arm tracers, can be distinguished from supergiants of class Ib, which may be older. We illustrate our procedures and apply them to a sample of GLIMPSE sources. We show that our methods give consistent results and can be used to identify distant supergiants among GLIMPSE sources.
Costa Edgar
MacConnell Darrell J.
Wing Robert F.
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