- ID:
- ivo://CDS.VizieR/J/AJ/161/157
- Title:
- 10 years radial-velocity monitoring of Vega with TRES
- Short Name:
- J/AJ/161/157
- Date:
- 18 Jan 2022
- Publisher:
- CDS
- Description:
- We present an analysis of 1524 spectra of Vega spanning 10yr, in which we search for periodic radial-velocity variations. A signal with a periodicity of 0.676day and a semi-amplitude of ~10m/s is consistent with the rotation period measured over much shorter time spans by previous spectroscopic and spectropolarimetric studies, confirming the presence of surface features on this A0 star. The activity signal appears to evolve on long timescales, which may indicate the presence of failed fossil magnetic fields on Vega. TESS data reveal Vega's photometric rotational modulation for the first time, with a total amplitude of only 10ppm. A comparison of the spectroscopic and photometric amplitudes suggests that the surface features may be dominated by bright plages rather than dark spots. For the shortest orbital periods, transit and radial-velocity injection recovery tests exclude the presence of transiting planets larger than 2R{Earth} and most non- transiting giant planets. At long periods, we combine our radial velocities with direct imaging from the literature to produce detection limits for Vegan planets and brown dwarfs out to distances of 15au. Finally, we detect a candidate radial-velocity signal with a period of 2.43days and a semi-amplitude of 6m/s. If caused by an orbiting companion, its minimum mass would be ~20M{Earth}; because of Vega's pole-on orientation, this would correspond to a Jovian planet if the orbit is aligned with the stellar spin. We discuss the prospects for confirmation of this candidate planet.
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- ID:
- ivo://CDS.VizieR/J/ApJ/749/177
- Title:
- Yellow and red supergiants in the LMC
- Short Name:
- J/ApJ/749/177
- Date:
- 21 Oct 2021
- Publisher:
- CDS
- Description:
- 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 (~278km/s) 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 ~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.
- ID:
- ivo://CDS.VizieR/J/ApJ/703/441
- Title:
- Yellow supergiants in M31
- Short Name:
- J/ApJ/703/441
- Date:
- 21 Oct 2021
- Publisher:
- CDS
- Description:
- The yellow supergiant (F- and G-type) content of nearby galaxies can provide a critical test of stellar evolution theory, bridging the gap between the hot, massive stars and the cool red supergiants. But, this region of the color-magnitude diagram is dominated by foreground contamination, requiring membership to somehow be determined. Fortunately, the large negative systemic velocity of M31, coupled to its high rotation rate, provides the means for separating the contaminating foreground dwarfs from the bona fide yellow supergiants within M31. We obtained radial velocities of ~2900 individual targets within the correct color-magnitude range corresponding to masses of 12M_{sun}_ and higher. A comparison of these velocities to those expected from M31's rotation curve reveals 54 rank-1 (near certain) and 66 rank-2 (probable) yellow supergiant members, indicating a foreground contamination >=96%. We expect some modest contamination from Milky Way halo giants among the remainder, particularly for the rank-2 candidates, and indeed follow-up spectroscopy of a small sample eliminates four rank 2's while confirming five others.
- ID:
- ivo://CDS.VizieR/J/ApJ/877/60
- Title:
- YMGs. I. Young binaries & lithium-rich stars
- Short Name:
- J/ApJ/877/60
- Date:
- 21 Oct 2021
- Publisher:
- CDS
- Description:
- Young stars in the solar neighborhood serve as nearby probes of stellar evolution and represent promising targets to directly image self-luminous giant planets. We have carried out an all-sky search for late-type (~K7-M5) stars within 100pc selected primarily on the basis of activity indicators from the Galaxy Evolution Explorer and ROSAT. Approximately 2000 active and potentially young stars are identified, of which we have followed up over 600 with low-resolution optical spectroscopy and over 1000 with diffraction-limited imaging using Robo-AO at the Palomar 1.5m telescope. Strong lithium is present in 58 stars, implying ages spanning ~10-200Myr. Most of these lithium-rich stars are new or previously known members of young moving groups including TWA, {beta}Pic, Tuc-Hor, Carina, Columba, Argus, ABDor, Upper Centaurus Lupus, and Lower Centaurus Crux; the rest appear to be young low-mass stars without connections to established kinematic groups. Over 200 close binaries are identified down to 0.2"-the vast majority of which are new-and will be valuable for dynamical mass measurements of young stars with continued orbit monitoring in the future.
- ID:
- ivo://CDS.VizieR/J/A+A/657/A129
- Title:
- 13 young brown dwarfs SINFONI spectra
- Short Name:
- J/A+A/657/A129
- Date:
- 22 Feb 2022
- Publisher:
- CDS
- Description:
- Studies of the low-mass population statistics in young clusters are the foundation for our understanding of the formation of low-mass stars and brown dwarfs. Robust low-mass populations can be obtained through near-infrared spectroscopy, which provides confirmation of the cool and young nature of member candidates. However, the spectroscopic analysis of these objects is often not performed in a uniform manner, and the assessment of youth generally relies on the visual inspection of youth features whose behavior is not well understood. We aim at building a method that efficiently identifies young low-mass stars and brown dwarfs from low-resolution near-infrared spectra, by studying gravity-sensitive features and their evolution with age. We built a dataset composed of all publicly available (~2800) near-infrared spectra of dwarfs with spectral types between M0 and L3. First, we investigate methods for the derivation of the spectral type and extinction using comparison to spectral templates, and various spectral indices. Then, we examine gravity-sensitive spectral indices and apply machine learning methods, in order to efficiently separate young (<~10Myr) objects from the field. Using a set of six spectral indices for spectral typing, including two newly defined ones (TLI-J and TLI-K), we are able to achieve a precision below 1 spectral subtype across the entire spectral type range. We define a new gravity-sensitive spectral index (TLI-g) that consistently separates young from field objects, showing a performance superior to other indices from the literature. Even better separation between the two classes can be achieved through machine learning methods which use the entire NIR spectra as an input. Moreover, we show that the H- and K-bands alone are enough for this purpose. Finally, we evaluate the relative importance of different spectral regions for gravity classification as returned by the machine learning models. We find that the H-band broad-band shape is the most relevant feature, followed by the FeH absorption bands at 1.2um and 1.24um and the KI doublet at 1.24.
- ID:
- ivo://CDS.VizieR/J/ApJ/525/466
- Title:
- Young low-mass stars and brown dwarfs in IC 348
- Short Name:
- J/ApJ/525/466
- Date:
- 21 Oct 2021
- Publisher:
- CDS
- Description:
- I present new results from a continuing program to identify and characterize the low-mass stellar and substellar populations in the young cluster IC 348 (0.5 - 10 Myr). Optical spectroscopy has revealed young objects with spectral types as late as M8.25. The intrinsic J-H and H-K colors of these sources are dwarflike, whereas the R-I and I-J colors appear intermediate between the colors of dwarfs and giants. Furthermore, the spectra from 6500 to 9500 {AA} are reproduced well with averages of standard dwarf and giant spectra, suggesting that such averages should be used in the classification of young late-type sources.
- ID:
- ivo://CDS.VizieR/J/AJ/158/201
- Title:
- Young star cluster Westerlund 2 observed with MUSE
- Short Name:
- J/AJ/158/201
- Date:
- 21 Oct 2021
- Publisher:
- CDS
- Description:
- We mapped the Galactic young massive star cluster Westerlund 2 with the integral field spectrograph MUSE (spatial resolution: 0.2 arcsec/px, spectral resolution: {Delta}{lambda}=1.25 {AA}, wavelength range: 4600-9350 {AA}) mounted on the Very Large Telescope. We present the fully reduced data set and introduce our new Python package "MUSEpack", which we developed to measure stellar radial velocities (RVs) with an absolute precision of 1-2 km/s without the necessity of a spectral template library. This novel method uses the two-dimensional spectra and an atomic transition line library to create templates around strong absorption lines for each individual star. Automatic, multi-core processing makes it possible to efficiently determine stellar RVs of a large number of stars with the necessary precision to measure the velocity dispersion of young star clusters. MUSEpack also provides an enhanced method for removing telluric lines in crowded fields without sky exposures, and a Python wrapper for ESO's data reduction pipeline. We observed Westerlund 2 with a total of 11 short and 5 long exposures (survey area: ~11 arcmin^2^ or 15.8 pc^2^) to cover the bright nebular emission and OB stars, as well as the fainter pre-main-sequence stars (>=1 M_{sun}_). We extracted 1725 stellar spectra with a mean signal-to-noise ratio of S/N>5 per pixel. Typical RV uncertainties of 4.78 km/s, 2.92 km/s, and 1.1 km/s are reached for stars with a mean S/N>10, S/N>20, and S/N>50 per pixel, respectively. It is possible to reach RV accuracies of 0.9 km/s, 1.3 km/s, and 2.2 km/s with >=5, 3-4, and 1-2 spectral lines used to measure the RVs, respectively. The combined statistical uncertainty on the RV measurements is 1.10 km/s.
- ID:
- ivo://CDS.VizieR/J/A+A/642/A57
- Title:
- Young visual M-dwarf binaries spectra
- Short Name:
- J/A+A/642/A57
- Date:
- 21 Oct 2021
- Publisher:
- CDS
- Description:
- We present the results from an integral field spectroscopy study of seven close visual binary pairs of young M-dwarf multiple systems. The target systems are part of the astrometric monitoring AstraLux program, surveying hundreds of M-dwarf systems for multiplicity and obtaining astrometric epochs for orbital constraints. Our new VLT/SINFONI data provides resolved spectral type classification in the J, H and K bands for seven of these low-mass M-dwarf binaries, which we determine by comparing them to empirical templates and examining the strength of water absorption in the K-band. The medium resolution K-band spectra also allows us to derive effective temperatures for the individual components. All targets in the survey display several signs of youth, and some have kinematics similar to young moving groups, or low surface gravities which we determine from measuring equivalent widths of gravity sensitive alkali lines in the J-band. Resolved photometry from our targets is also compared with isochrones from theoretical evolutionary models, further implying young ages. Dynamical masses will be provided from ongoing monitoring of these systems, which can be seen as emblematic binary benchmarks that may be used to calibrate evolutionary models for low-mass stars in the future.
- ID:
- ivo://CDS.VizieR/J/ApJS/237/30
- Title:
- 6-yr light curves of 10 blazars
- Short Name:
- J/ApJS/237/30
- Date:
- 21 Oct 2021
- Publisher:
- CDS
- Description:
- We carried out multi-color optical monitoring of a sample of 10 blazars from 2005 to 2011. The sample contains 3 LBLs, 2 IBLs, 4 HBLs, and 1 FSRQ. Our monitoring focused on the long-term variability and the sample included nine BL Lac objects and one flat-spectrum radio quasar (FSRQ). A total of 14,799 data points were collected. This is one of the largest optical databases for a sample of 10 blazars. All objects showed significant variability except for OT 546. Because of the low sampling on each single night, only BL Lacertae were observed to have intraday variability on 2006 November 6. Most BL Lac objects showed a bluer-when-brighter (BWB) chromatism, while the FSRQ, 3C 454.3, displayed a redder-when-brighter trend. The BWB color behaviors of most BL Lacs can be at least partly attributed to the trend of increasing variation amplitude with increasing frequency observed in these objects. The average spectral index of LBLs is around 1.5, as expected from the model dominated by synchrotron self-Compton loss. The optical emission of HBL is probably contaminated by the thermal emission from the host galaxies. Correlation analysis did not reveal any time delay between variations at different wavelengths.
- ID:
- ivo://CDS.VizieR/J/ApJ/851/132
- Title:
- ~30yr of opt. spectroscopy & Vmag obs. of GW Ori
- Short Name:
- J/ApJ/851/132
- Date:
- 21 Oct 2021
- Publisher:
- CDS
- Description:
- We present spatially and spectrally resolved Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) observations of gas and dust orbiting the pre-main-sequence hierarchical triple-star system GW Ori. A forward modeling of the ^13^CO and C^18^O J=2-1 transitions permits a measurement of the total stellar mass in this system, 5.29+/-0.09M_{sun}_, and the circumtriple disk inclination, 137.6{deg}+/-2.0{deg}. Optical spectra spanning a 35yr period were used to derive new radial velocities and, coupled with a spectroscopic disentangling technique, revealed that the A and B components of GW Ori form a double-lined spectroscopic binary with a period of 241.50+/-0.05d; a tertiary companion orbits that inner pair with a period of 4218+/-50d. Combining the results from the ALMA data and the optical spectra with three epochs of astrometry in the literature, we constrain the individual stellar masses in the system (M_A_~2.7M_{sun}_, M_B_~1.7M_{sun}_, M_C_~0.9M_{sun}_) and find strong evidence that at least one of the stellar orbital planes (and likely both) is misaligned with the disk plane by as much as 45{deg}. A V-band light curve spanning 30yr reveals several new ~30-day eclipse events 0.1-0.7mag in depth and a 0.2mag sinusoidal oscillation that is clearly phased with the AB-C orbital period. Taken together, these features suggest that the A-B pair may be partially obscured by material in the inner disk as the pair approaches apoastron in the hierarchical orbit. Lastly, we conclude that stellar evolutionary models are consistent with our measurements of the masses and basic photospheric properties if the GW Ori system is ~1Myr old.
