Carbon monoxide bands in M dwarfs

Free access article

Issue		A&A Volume 396, Number 3, December IV 2002


Page(s)		967 - 975
Section		Stellar atmospheres
DOI		http://dx.doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361:20021454

A&A 396, 967-975 (2002)
DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361:20021454

Carbon monoxide bands in M dwarfs

Y. V. Pavlenko¹ and H. R. A. Jones²

¹ Main Astronomical Observatory of Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, Golosiiv woods, Kyiv-127, 03680 Ukraine
e-mail: yp@mao.kiev.ua
² Astrophysics Research Institute, Liverpool John Moores University, Egerton Wharf, Birkenhead CH41 1LD, UK
e-mail: hraj@astro.livjm.ac.uk

(Received 18 July 2002 / Accepted 30 September 2002)

Abstract
We compare the observational and theoretical spectra of the $\Delta v = 2$ CO bands in a range of M dwarfs. We investigate the dependence of theoretical spectra on effective temperatures as well as carbon abundance. In general we find that the synthetic CO bands fit the observed data extremely well and are excellent diagnostics. In particular the synthetic spectra reasonably match observations and the best fit temperatures are similar to those found by empirical methods. We also examine the ¹²C/ ¹³C isotopic ratio. We find that fundamental ¹³CO bands around 2.345 and 2.375 $\mu$ m are good discriminators for the ¹²C/ ¹³C ratio in M dwarfs. The 2.375 $\mu$ m band is more useful because it doesn't suffer such serious contamination by water vapour transitions. Our current dataset does not quite have the wavelength coverage to perform a reliable determination of the ¹²C/ ¹³C ratio in M dwarfs. For this we recommend observing the region 2.31-2.40 $\mu$ m at a resolution of better than 1000. Alternatively the observational problems of contamination by water vapour at 2.345 $\mu$ m maybe solved by observing at resolutions of around 50 000. We also investigated the possibility of using the $\Delta v$ = 1 CO bands around 4.5 $\mu$ m. We find that the contamination due to water vapour is even more of a problem at these wavelengths.

Key words: stars: fundamental parameter

Offprint request: Ya. V. Pavlenko, yp@mao.kiev.ua

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