Identification of emission-line stars in transition phase from pre-main sequence to main sequence

Pre-main-sequence (PMS) stars evolve into main-sequence (MS) phase over a period of time. Interestingly, we found a scarcity of studies in existing literature that examine and attempt to better understand the stars in PMS to MS transition phase. The purpose of this study is to detect such rare stars, which we named as 'transition phase' (TP) candidates - stars evolving from the PMS to the MS phase. We identified 98 TP candidates using photometric analysis of a sample of 2167 classical Be (CBe) and 225 Herbig Ae/Be (HAeBe) stars. This identification is done by analysing the near- and mid-infrared excess and their location in the optical colour-magnitude diagram. The age and mass of 58 of these TP candidates are determined to be between 0.1-5 Myr and 2-10.5 M-circle dot, respectively. The TP candidates are found to possess rotational velocity and colour excess values in between CBe and HAeBe stars, which is reconfirmed by generating a set of synthetic samples using the machine learning approach.

Automated summary

The study identified 98 rare stars transitioning from pre-main-sequence to main-sequence phase through photometric analysis, with the age and mass of 58 candidates determined. These transition phase candidates exhibit rotational velocity and color excess values between classical Be and Herbig Ae/Be stars.