Bulletin de la Société Royale des Sciences de Liège Bulletin de la Société Royale des Sciences de Liège -  Volume 80 - Année 2011 

In savvy pursuit of Local Group blue massive stars

Miriam Garcia

Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, La Laguna, Spain, and Universidad de La Laguna, La Laguna, Spain

Artemio Herrero

Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, La Laguna, Spain, and Universidad de La Laguna, La Laguna, Spain

Norberto Castro

Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, La Laguna, Spain, and Universidad de La Laguna, La Laguna, Spain

Luis José Corral

Instituto de Astronomía y Meteorología, Universidad de Guadalajara, México

Abstract

The important role of metallicity on massive star evolution and the combination of multi-object spectrographs and 10m class telescopes, have lead to numerous systematic studies of massive stars in Local Group galaxies. While color based quests of blue massive stars are relatively successful, they must be confirmed with spectroscopy and usually lead to lists dominated by B-type modest-mass stars. We have developed a friends of friends code to find OB associations in Local Group galaxies, presented in Garcia et al. (2009). One of the key points of the method is the photometric criterion to choose candidate OB stars from the reddeningfree Q parameter, that could be easily extended to include from GALEX to near-IR photometry. While not a new idea, one of our code’s strong advantages is the automatic determination of evolutionary masses for the members, enabling a quick and more insightful choice of candidates for spectroscopy, and the identification of potential advanced evolutionary stages. We present our work on the very metal-poor irregular galaxy IC 1613 (Garcia et al. 2010a). The association properties are not only a powerful aid towards finding the most interesting candidate massive stars, but also reveal the galaxy’s structure and recent star formation history.

Pour citer cet article

Miriam Garcia, Artemio Herrero, Norberto Castro & Luis José Corral, «In savvy pursuit of Local Group blue massive stars», Bulletin de la Société Royale des Sciences de Liège [En ligne], Volume 80 - Année 2011, 381 - 385 URL : https://popups.uliege.be/0037-9565/index.php?id=2852.