No Arabic abstract
We present the Spitzer Atlas of Stellar Spectra (SASS), which includes 159 stellar spectra (5 to 32 mic; R~100) taken with the Infrared Spectrograph on the Spitzer Space Telescope. This Atlas gathers representative spectra of a broad section of the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram, intended to serve as a general stellar spectral reference in the mid-infrared. It includes stars from all luminosity classes, as well as Wolf-Rayet (WR) objects. Furthermore, it includes some objects of intrinsic interest, like blue stragglers and certain pulsating variables. All the spectra have been uniformly reduced, and all are available online. For dwarfs and giants, the spectra of early-type objects are relatively featureless, dominated by Hydrogen lines around A spectral types. Besides these, the most noticeable photospheric features correspond to water vapor and silicon monoxide in late-type objects and methane and ammonia features at the latest spectral types. Most supergiant spectra in the Atlas present evidence of circumstellar gas. The sample includes five M supergiant spectra, which show strong dust excesses and in some cases PAH features. Sequences of WR stars present the well-known pattern of lines of HeI and HeII, as well as forbidden lines of ionized metals. The characteristic flat-top shape of the [Ne III] line is evident even at these low spectral resolutions. Several Luminous Blue Variables and other transition stars are present in the Atlas and show very diverse spectra, dominated by circumstellar gas and dust features. We show that the [8]-[24] Spitzer colors (IRAC and MIPS) are poor predictors of spectral type for most luminosity classes.
Context. Stellar spectral synthesis is essential for various applications, ranging from determining stellar parameters to comprehensive stellar variability calculations. New observational resources as well as advanced stellar atmosphere modelling, taking three dimensional (3D) effects from radiative magnetohydrodynamics calculations into account, require a more efficient radiative transfer. Aims. For accurate, fast and flexible calculations of opacity distribution functions (ODFs), stellar atmospheres and stellar spectra we developed an efficient code building on the well-established ATLAS9 code. The new code also paves the way for an easy and fast access to different elemental compositions in stellar calculations. Methods. For the generation of ODF tables we further developed the well-established DFSYNTHE code by implementing additional functionality, and a speed-up by employing a parallel computation scheme. In addition, the line lists used can be changed from Kuruczs recent lists. In particular, we implemented the VALD3 line list. Results. A new code, the Merged Parallelised Simplified ATLAS is presented. It combines the efficient generation of ODF, atmosphere modelling and spectral synthesis in local thermodynamic equilibrium, therefore being an all-in-one code. This all-in-one code provides more numerical functionality and is substantially faster compared to other available codes. The fully portable MPS-ATLAS code is validated against previous ATLAS9 calculations, the PHOENIX code calculations, and high quality observations.
We present the spectral atlas of sources observed in low resolution with the Infrared Spectrograph on board the Spitzer Space Telescope. More than 11,000 distinct sources were extracted using a dedicated algorithm based on the SMART software with an optimal extraction (AdOpt package). These correspond to all 13,000 low resolution observations of fixed objects (both single source and cluster observations). The pipeline includes image cleaning, individual exposure combination, and background subtraction. A particular attention is given to bad pixel and outlier rejection at the image and spectra levels. Most sources are spatially unresolved so that optimal extraction reaches the highest possible signal-to-noise ratio. For all sources, an alternative extraction is also provided that accounts for all of the source flux within the aperture. CASSIS provides publishable quality spectra through an online database together with several important diagnostics, such as the source spatial extent and a quantitative measure of detection level. Ancillary data such as available spectroscopic redshifts are also provided. The database interface will eventually provide various ways to interact with the spectra, such as on-the-fly measurements of spectral features or comparisons among spectra.
The RAdial Velocity Experiment (RAVE) is a medium resolution R~7500 spectroscopic survey of the Milky Way which already obtained over half a million stellar spectra. They present a randomly selected magnitude-limited sample, so it is important to use a reliable and automated classification scheme which identifies normal single stars and discovers different types of peculiar stars. To this end we present a morphological classification of 350,000 RAVE survey stellar spectra using locally linear embedding, a dimensionality reduction method which enables representing the complex spectral morphology in a low dimensional projected space while still preserving the properties of the local neighborhoods of spectra. We find that the majority of all spectra in the database ~90-95% belong to normal single stars, but there is also a significant population of several types of peculiars. Among them the most populated groups are those of various types of spectroscopic binary and chromospherically active stars. Both of them include several thousands of spectra. Particularly the latter group offers significant further investigation opportunities since activity of stars is a known proxy of stellar ages. Applying the same classification procedure to the sample of normal single stars alone shows that the shape of the projected manifold in two dimensional space correlates with stellar temperature, surface gravity and metallicity.
Empirical stellar spectral libraries have applications in both extragalactic and stellar studies, and they have an advantage over theoretical libraries because they naturally include all relevant chemical species and physical processes. During recent years we see a stream of new high quality sets of spectra, but increasing the spectral resolution and widening the wavelength coverage means resorting to multi-order echelle spectrographs. Assembling the spectra from many pieces results in lower fidelity of their shapes. We aim to offer the community a library of high signal-to-noise spectra with reliable continuum shapes. Furthermore, the using an integral field unit (IFU) alleviates the issue of slit losses. Our library was build with the MUSE (Multi-Unit Spectroscopic Explorer) IFU instrument. We obtained spectra over nearly the entire visual band (lambda~4800-9300 Ang). We assembled a library of 35 high-quality MUSE spectra for a subset of the stars from the X-shooter Spectral Library. We verified the continuum shape of these spectra with synthetic broad band colors derived from the spectra. We also report some spectral indices from the Lick system, derived from the new observations. We offer a high-fidelity set of stellar spectra that covers the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram. It can be useful for both extragalactic and stellar work and demonstrates that the IFUs are excellent tools for building reliable spectral libraries.
We present near-infrared spectroscopic observations of massive stars in three stellar clusters located in the direction of the inner Galaxy. One of them, the Quartet, is a new discovery while the other two were previously reported as candidate clusters identified on mid-infrared Spitzer images (GLIMPSE20 and GLIMPSE13). Using medium-resolution (R=900-1320) H and K spectroscopy, we firmly establish the nature of the brightest stars in these clusters, yielding new identifications of an early WC and two Ofpe/WN9 stars in the Quartet and an early WC star in GLIMPSE20. We combine this information with the available photometric measurements from 2MASS, to estimate cluster masses, ages, and distances. The presence of several massive stars places the Quartet and GLIMPSE20 among the small sample of known Galactic stellar clusters with masses of a few 10^3 Msun, and ages from 3 to 8 Myr. We estimate a distance of about 3.5 kpc for Glimpse 20, and 6.0 kpc for Quartet. The large number of giant stars identified in GLIMPSE13 indicates that it is another massive (~ 6500 Msun) cluster, but older, with an age between 30 and 100 Myr, at a distance of about 3 kpc.