Journal
ASTROPHYSICAL JOURNAL
Volume 749, Issue 2, Pages -Publisher
IOP PUBLISHING LTD
DOI: 10.1088/0004-637X/749/2/177
Keywords
galaxies: individual (LMC); galaxies: stellar content; Magellanic Clouds; stars: evolution; supergiants
Categories
Funding
- National Science Foundation [AST-1008020]
- National Aeronautics and Space Administration
- Division Of Astronomical Sciences
- Direct For Mathematical & Physical Scien [1008020] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
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Due to their transitionary nature, yellow supergiants (YSGs) provide a critical challenge for evolutionary modeling. Previous studies within M31 and the Small Magellanic Cloud show that the Geneva evolutionary models do a poor job at predicting the lifetimes of these short-lived stars. Here, we extend this study to the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) while also investigating the galaxy's red supergiant (RSG) content. This task is complicated by contamination by Galactic foreground stars that color and magnitude criteria alone cannot weed out. Therefore, we use proper-motions and the LMC's large systemic radial velocity (similar to 278 km s(-1)) to separate out these foreground dwarfs. After observing nearly 2000 stars, we identified 317 probable YSGs, 6 possible YSGs, and 505 probable RSGs. Foreground contamination of our YSG sample was similar to 80%, while that of the RSG sample was only 3%. By placing the YSGs on the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram and comparing them against the evolutionary tracks, we find that new Geneva evolutionary models do an exemplary job at predicting both the locations and the lifetimes of these transitory objects.
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