In savvy pursuit of Local Group blue massive stars

Garcia, Miriam; Herrero, Artemio; Castro, Norberto; José Corral, Luis
Bibliographical reference

Société Royale des Sciences de Liège, Bulletin, vol. 80, p. 381-385 (Proceedings of the 39th Liège Astrophysical Colloquium, held in Liège 12-16 July 2010, edited by G. Rauw, M. De Becker, Y. Nazé, J.-M. Vreux, P. Williams)

Advertised on:
1
2011
Number of authors
4
IAC number of authors
0
Citations
2
Refereed citations
2
Description
The important role of metallicity on massive star evolution and the combination of multi-object spectrographs and 10m class telescopes, have lead to numerous systematic studies of massive stars in Local Group galaxies. While color based quests of blue massive stars are relatively successful, they must be confirmed with spectroscopy and usually lead to lists dominated by B-type modest-mass stars. We have developed a friends of friends code to find OB associations in Local Group galaxies, presented in Garcia et al. (2009). One of the key points of the method is the photometric criterion to choose candidate OB stars from the reddening-free Q parameter, that could be easily extended to include from GALEX to near-IR photometry. While not a new idea, one of our code's strong advantages is the automatic determination of evolutionary masses for the members, enabling a quick and more insightful choice of candidates for spectroscopy, and the identification of potential advanced evolutionary stages. We present our work on the very metal-poor irregular galaxy IC 1613 (Garcia et al. 2010a). The association properties are not only a powerful aid towards finding the most interesting candidate massive stars, but also reveal the galaxy's structure and recent star formation history.