4.6 Article

SPITZER SAGE-SMC INFRARED PHOTOMETRY OF MASSIVE STARS IN THE SMALL MAGELLANIC CLOUD

Journal

ASTRONOMICAL JOURNAL
Volume 140, Issue 2, Pages 416-429

Publisher

IOP PUBLISHING LTD
DOI: 10.1088/0004-6256/140/2/416

Keywords

catalogs; galaxies: individual (SMC); infrared: stars; stars: early-type; stars: emission-line; Be; stars: massive

Funding

  1. Space Telescope Science Institute
  2. NASA [NAG5-12595]
  3. National Aeronautics and Space Administration
  4. National Science Foundation
  5. Science and Technology Facilities Council [ST/G002355/1, PP/D000955/1, PP/F000057/1] Funding Source: researchfish
  6. STFC [ST/G002355/1, PP/D000955/1, PP/F000057/1] Funding Source: UKRI

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We present a catalog of 5324 massive stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), with accurate spectral types compiled from the literature, and a photometric catalog for a subset of 3654 of these stars, with the goal of exploring their infrared properties. The photometric catalog consists of stars with infrared counterparts in the Spitzer SAGE-SMC survey database, for which we present uniform photometry from 0.3 to 24 mu m in the UBVIJHK(s)+IRAC+MIPS24 bands. We compare the color-magnitude diagrams and color-color diagrams to those of stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), finding that the brightest infrared sources in the SMC are also the red supergiants, supergiant B[e] (sgB[e]) stars, luminous blue variables, and Wolf-Rayet stars, with the latter exhibiting less infrared excess, the red supergiants being less dusty and the sgB[e] stars being on average less luminous. Among the objects detected at 24 mu m in the SMC are a few very luminous hypergiants, four B-type stars with peculiar, flat spectral energy distributions, and all three known luminous blue variables. We detect a distinct Be star sequence, displaced to the red, and suggest a novel method of confirming Be star candidates photometrically. We find a higher fraction of Oe and Be stars among O and early-B stars in our SMC catalog, respectively, when compared to the LMC catalog, and that the SMC Be stars occur at higher luminosities. We estimate mass-loss rates for the red supergiants, confirming the correlation with luminosity even at the metallicity of the SMC. Finally, we confirm the new class of stars displaying composite A & F type spectra, the sgB[e] nature of 2dFS1804 and find the F0 supergiant 2dFS3528 to be a candidate luminous blue variable with cold dust.

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