Eleven New Heavily Reddened Field Wolf–Rayet Stars
Abstract
We report the results of a medium-narrowband 2 μm line survey covering 5.8 deg^2 near the Galactic plane. We confirm 11 new field Wolf-Rayet stars along three lines of sight probing the inner Galaxy, demonstrating the capability to uncover distant and highly reddened populations of Galactic wind-borne emission-line stars suffering extinction as high as A_V ~ 40 and as distant as 9 kpc down to modest magnitude limits of K_s ~ 12.5. All stars are of subtype WC7-8, with median distance d = 6 kpc and median extinction A_(Ks) = 2.5. Over the fields surveyed, the density of Wolf-Rayet stars to limiting magnitude K_s ~ 12.5 was found to be 1.9 deg^(–2). We compare this to models which predict their distribution within the Galaxy and find that, even neglecting survey and subtype incompleteness, they consistently underpredict the number of newly discovered stars along the surveyed lines of sight.
Additional Information
© 2012 American Astronomical Society. Received 2011 August 3; accepted 2012 August 24; published 2012 November 2. Author J.D.T.S. is grateful for support for this project from a William F. and Elizabeth Lucas Junior Faculty Award. This work is also supported (in part) by NASA through the Spitzer Space Telescope Fellowship Program, through a contract issued by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with NASA. We thank D. Figer for early access to a K-band spectral WR catalog, which was crucial for filter design, R. Finn and J. Hinz for their help designing the Pisces observational program, C. Karp of Chroma Technology Corp. for his assistance with filter construction and deployment, W. Vacca for useful discussions on NIR WR typing, J. Wilson, M. Skrutskie, and D. Peterson for their support of CorMASS observations and reductions, and an anonymous referee for comments which substantially improved this work.Attached Files
Published - 1538-3881_144_6_166.pdf
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Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 36369
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20130115-084423445
- William F. and Elizabeth Lucas Junior Faculty Award
- NASA Spitzer Fellowship
- NASA/JPL/Caltech
- Created
-
2013-01-15Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2021-11-09Created from EPrint's last_modified field
- Caltech groups
- Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC)