A&A 467, 137-143 (2007)
DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361:20065041
M. Corti1 - G. Bosch1 - V. Niemela2
1 - Facultad de Ciencias Astronómicas y Geofísicas,
U.N. La Plata, Paseo del Bosque s/n, 1900 La Plata,
Argentina, Instituto de Astrofísica de La Plata (IALP), CONICET,
Argentina
2 -
Member of Carrera del Investigador Científico, CIC-BA,
Visiting Astronomer, CTIO, NOAO, operated by AURA, Inc., for NSF
Facultad de Ciencias Astronómicas y Geofísicas,
U.N. La Plata, Paseo del Bosque s/n, 1900 La Plata,
Argentina
Received 17 Febuary 2006 / Accepted 15 January 2007
Abstract
Context. The presence of a Wolf-Rayet star, WR12, at
,
(J2000.0), triggered the search for a surrounding OB association now known as Bochum 7. Several papers have dealt with the existence of Bo 7, but none actually included spectral types of the stars. To assure the spectral types of members of the association, it is essential to have spectral images of them.
Aims. In this paper we present previously unpublished spectra of OB stars over a 30 arcmin field covering the estimated field of the galactic OB association.
Methods. From UBV aperture photometry, OB star candidates were selected, and optical spectroscopic observations were obtained for these in CASLEO, Argentina.
Results. 63 stars were classified as OB type, including 8 stars already present in the LSS catalogue, and 37 of these 63 stars did not have a well-known spectral type. The OB stars were used to test the properties of the interstellar dust in the line of sight and the relation between the diffuse interestelar band at 4428 Å, which grows linearly with E(B-V) until 1 mag. Combining our data with 2MASS IR photometry we tested and confirmed that derivation of stellar parameters from our photometry, using the CHORIZOS code, is highly reliable.
Key words: Galaxy: open clusters and associations: individual: Bochum 7 - stars: early-type - techniques: spectroscopic - techniques: photometric
Relatively low extinction at the region in the third quadrant in
the Galactic plane allows
deep analysis of the stellar population and galactic structure
towards the outskirts of our Galaxy. The lack of tightly bound and
easily identifiable young open clusters leads to the quest for OB
associations as tracers of spiral arms. Massive stars are usually
found in groups, and the presence of a Wolf-Rayet star, WR12 in
the catalogue of galactic WR stars (van der Hucht 2001), at
,
58
55.5
(J2000.0), triggered the search
for a surrounding OB association. Moffat & Vogt (1975) suggested that
several OB stars listed in the LSS
catalogue (Stephenson & Sanduleak 1971) around WR12 may be an OB association,
namely Bochum 7, at 5.8 kpc, although the membership of WR12 itself
was in doubt.
Lundstrom & Stenholm (1984) proposed that Bo 7 is an OB association of
30 pc of size. On the other hand,
Sung et al. (1999) suggested that the stars associated with Bo 7 are
only a local concentration in the density of young stars belonging
to the Vel OB3 association. From data of the 7 stars listed in the
LSS catalogue, Corti et al. (2003) derive a spectroscopic and
kinematical distance of about 5.0 kpc for Bo 7, supporting the idea that the Wolf-Rayet star LS 1145 = WR 12
was also member of this association.
In this work, we present the analysis made with photometric and spectroscopic data of the stars in a 30 arcmin field surrounding WR 12. With these we obtained spectral types, colour excesses, equivalent widths of the DIB 4428 feature, and distances for the OB stars found in the observed field. By comparing stellar temperatures and reddening derived from photometric and spectroscopic data we analyse the reliability of the (more abundant) photometric ones.
The paper is organized as follows: in Sect. 2 we describe the observations. In Sect. 3 we present the results and their discussion, and in Sect. 4 we summarize the main issues. In a later paper (Paper II) we will increase the number of stars that will be analysed, including OB stars without spectral data. We will estimate the distances and colour excesses of other possible members. Combining this information with proper motions we will be able to identify the stellar groups and to infer their evolutionary stages.
We obtained UBV photometric images with the 1-m Curtis-Schmidt
telescope and
a Thompson
CCD with 19
m pixels at the Cerro Tololo
Inter-American Observatory (CTIO), Chile, in March 5, 1994. This instrumental
configuration yields a
arcmin field of view, centred
at
,
56
22
(J2000.0) (
,
).
The scale on the detector is 1.834 arcsec/pixel, which subsamples
a stellar image under average seeing conditions at CTIO. CCD
acquisition was set to obtain images with GAIN = 3.3 e-/ADU and
RDNOISE = 7e-.
Different exposure times were used for each filter: 10 s for
the V and B filters and 20 s for the U filter. The same
number of images were taken for the Landolt photometric standard
region sa104 (Landolt 1992). For these images the exposure times were 10, 20, and 60 s for the V, B, and U filters respectively.
The transformation relations used here were:
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(1) |
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(2) |
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(3) |
Spectral images were obtained at the Complejo Astronómico El
Leoncito (CASLEO), San Juan, Argentina, during
several observing runs between 2000 and 2002. The instrumental
configurations used were: the Boller and Chivens (B&C) and the
REOSC Cassegrain spectrographs attached to the 2.15-m telescope at
CASLEO. In both spectrographs we used a
600 l mm-1 grating, and the slit width was set to match an aperture of 2 to 3 arcsec according to the average seeing at CASLEO. Fifteen
spectra were secured with the B&C spectrograph
during January 2001. This spectrograph holds a Photometrics CCD of
pixels, at a 20
m pixel size. The
reciprocal dispersion of these spectra is
2.3 Å px-1 and
the spectral range 3800-5000 Å. The signal-to-noise ratio was
always higher than 120. One hundred and eighty spectra were obtained with the
REOSC Cassegrain spectrograph during January 2000, February 2001,
and January and February 2002, using a TEK
pixel
CCD detector, with a pixel size of 24
m. The reciprocal
dispersion was
1.65 Å px-1. The spectral range of
these spectra is 3700-5200 Å and the signal-to-noise ratio
ranges from 150 to 200.
He-Ar comparison lamp images were observed at the same telescope
position as the stellar images immediately after or before the
stellar exposures. Bias frames were also obtained every night, as
well as spectra of the planetary nebula IC418 and HR 1996 as
radial velocity standards stars. All spectra
were processed and analysed with IRAF routines at La Plata Observatory.
IRAF's standard image reduction procedures were followed and aperture
photometry was calculated on science and standard images, as subsampling
prevented us from performing point-spread function photometry.
The aperture radius chosen was 1.5 pixels, and the sky annulus
inner radius was 5 pixels from the star centre and 3 pixels
wide. Approximately 2000 stars were identified in the field of view
including stars as faint as .
We compared our photometric results with those of Sung et al. (1999),
who had obtained UBVI CCD photometry for the region centred at
,
(J2000.0) using the 1-m telescope (f/8) at
Siding Spring Observatory. To do so, we first derived an
astrometric calibration for our stars, using the ASTROM task within
STARLINK software package. We then correlated our photometry table
with that of Sung et al. (1999), matching stars by their celestial
coordinates. In this way, we found
1100 stars in common,
with more than 300 stars with magnitudes brighter than 15 in the V-band.
The comparison between both photometries can be seen in
Fig. 2, where it is possible to detect a minor
systematic difference (0.04 mag) between our photometry and
that of Sung et al. (1999). We have also used their photometry as
reference for estimating an upper limit for the overall
uncertainty in our derived magnitudes, obtaining the magnitude
differences between our photometry and that of Sung et al. (1999),
which was found to be about 0.08 mag in V, 0.10 mag in B, and 0.18 mag in U. This
way, the uncertainty in our colours were 0.13 mag in (B-V) and 0.21 mag in (U-B). The colours (B-V) and (U-B) and
the magnitudes V are listed in Table 1.
We analysed our UBV photometric data and selected more than 100 stars brighter than
with colours belonging to early-type
stars. The selection was done using the reddening-free parameter Q (Schmidt-Kaler 1982). Although it would be safer to pick only stars
with Q < -0.5 as early-type candidates, the number of stars with Q satisfying this and also brighter than 15 mag was too
small. We therefore included stars with
-0.5 < Q < -0.3, although
the probability of detecting true B-type stars was unavoidably
reduced. This brightness limit was included to build our target
list for the spectroscopic runs described in Sect. 2.2 as the need of high signal-to-noise spectra
imposes further restrictions on the target magnitudes for
obtaining spectra at CASLEO.
Table 1: Photometric and spectroscopic information for individual stars analysed in this work.
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Figure 1:
V frame of Bochum 7 centred at
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Figure 2: Differences between our photometry and that of Sung et al. (1999). There is a minor difference between both photometries of about 0.04 mag in V. The lines for 0 mag and 0 colours show the offsets more clearly. |
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The spectral classification of selected stars was done by comparing
obtained spectra with the Digital Atlas of OB Stars published by
Walborn & Fitzpatrick(1990, WF90). As the spectral resolution of our data (1.65 Å px-1) was lower than the WF90 atlas (0.5 Å px-1), we
have also obtained high signal-to-noise spectra (
)
of the atlas stars to detect important features for
the classification of early-type stars. However, the signal-to-noise
ratio decreases for fainter stars,
leading to somewhat larger uncertainties in the spectral
classification. With these data we are reproducing the WF90 atlas for
lower dispersion spectrographs. A preliminary version of the atlas
is already available on the internet at http://fcaglp.unlp.edu.ar/~mariela/OBSpectralAtlas.
From a final set of 102 stars, we classified 63 stars as early (OB) type, among which 50 are main sequence objects and 13 are subgiants, giants, or luminous giants. Among these 63 OB type stars, we found new spectral types for 37 stars. From Fig. 4 to Fig. 15 show the complete sample of classified spectra. The complete list can be found in Table 1. The availability of our Atlas of OB standards allowed us to reassess previous spectral classification (Corti et al. 2003). In this way, we classified LS 1132 as a B2IV and LS 1147 as a B0IIIe, previously classified as B3V and B1Ve, respectively. We searched the data about the spectral types of these 63 stars in the "Catalog of Galactic OB Stars'' (Reed 2003), and we only found our own references (Corti et al. 2003) for the stars in the Luminous Star Catalogue (Stephenson & Sanduleak 1971), together with SpT = O6III (Vijapurkar & Drilling 1993) and O7Vn (Vijapurkar & Drilling 1993) for LS 1135 and LS 1131, respectively.
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Figure 3: Relation between the temperature values obtained from our photometric data using the CHORIZOS code (y-axis) and the data derived from known spectral types (x-axis). CBN84349.6-460711 is a binary system and CBN84324.0-460831 and CBN84424.9-455334 are two real candidates of binary systems. See discussion in the text. |
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Figure 4: Sample spectra of stars in the region of Bochum 7. Spectra are normalised. This figure includes a wide range of O spectral types. The complete list can be found in Table 1. |
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Figure 5: Sample spectra of stars in the region of Bochum 7. Spectra are normalised. This figure includes a wide range of B spectral types. The complete list can be found in Table 1. |
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With our spectral classification we are able to test the
derivation of basic stellar parameters, such as temperature and
observed extinction, from photometric data. This will be useful
when analysing the larger sample of stars for which we only have
photometry available for the UBVJHK
analysis and for which
we employed the CHORIZOS code (Maíz-Apellániz 2004). For this we used the
atmospheres of Kurucz (2004) with Z = 0.0 and main sequence
gravity as model atmospheres. The Kurucz atmospheres were extinguished using
and E(4405-5495) ranging from -0.5 to 5.0. The CHORIZOS code did the
zero point (hereafter ZP) correction in all the synthetic magnitudes,
employing the ZP correction of Maíz Apellániz (2006) for the Johnson system UBV and the ZP correction of Cohen et al. (2003) for the 2MASS JHK
photometry.
Figure 3 shows the comparison of the star's temperature obtained
with the spectral classification and that obtained with the photometric data.
An overall good agreement, within
observational errors, can be readily see. Stars with notorious
discrepancies are labelled in the plot and discussed below. Among
the hotter stars, CBN84349.6-460711 is a binary system
(Corti et al. 2003) and CBN84324.0-460831 and CBN84424.9-455334 are two
strong candidates of binary system (Corti 2005). The last two
stars show large variations among the radial velocities at the
absortion lines in their respective spectra (Corti, in
preparation).
The reason for the discrepancy between the temperature
obtained with the spectral classification and photometric data of
these stars could be that the secondary component participates in
their colours and for this reason the temperature obtained with the
photometric data does not agree with the spectroscopic
temperature.
We studied the 4428 Å DIB in our medium resolution spectra of OB stars. We fitted a Gaussian function to the profile of the DIB in 6 O-type and 54 B-type stars of our sample, and measured the equivalent width (EW) of the DIB in the spectrum of each star. EWs are listed in Table 1. This DIB is well evident in the blue optical spectra in Fig. 4. Stars of early spectral type, such as those included in this work, are especially useful for 4428 Å diffuse band studies.
Figure 16 shows the correlation of 4428
equivalent width with the stellar colour excess E(B-V), for the sample
shown in Fig. 1. We have added data points from
Herbig (1975) so as to include DIB measurements for stars of the
same reddening as those in our sample. We have also added points
from Snow et al. (2002) representing very heavily reddened lines of
sight in Cygnus.
The plot shows a positive correlation, as suggested by
Herbig (1975), at least up to roughly
mag
in our data. However, we find a steeper slope for the linear fit
through our data than Herbig (1975), and it can also be seen that
our data seem to complement those of Snow et al. (2002) better.
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Figure 16:
Correlation of ![]() ![]() |
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The combination of photometric and spectroscopic information provides the only chance of determining individual colour excesses of the program stars, and hence of analysing the behaviour of the interstellar extinction in the line of sight. Figure 17 shows the photometric E(B-V) obtained using the CHORIZOS code with the atmosphere models mentioned previously vs. spectroscopic E(B-V), both with their error bars. It is possible to see a very good correspondence between both.
In the colour-colour diagram (Fig. 18), we have plotted the sixty-three OB stars and the other thirty-nine stars with spectral types between A0 and G3. It can be seen that the contamination of stars earlier than B8 type increases sharply as we move down to A0 type stars (Schmidt-Kaler 1982). There are two stars named CBN84431.8-455813 and CBN84446.0-45544 that do not fall where expected according to their spectral types. We reviewed their photometry and their spectral data and could not find any visible source for this odd behaviour, although they could be unresolved visual binaries.
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Figure 17: Comparison of the colour excesses (B-V) obtained using the combination of photometric and spectroscopic information of our stars in the x-axis and using only photometric with CHORIZOS code (Maíz-Apellániz 2004) in the y-axis. Both data sets have their respective errors. |
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Figure 18: Colour-colour diagram of the stars in the field of Bochum 7 with photometric and spectroscopic data. The sixty-three OB stars are plotted with filled hexagons and the other thirty-nine stars with spectral types between A0 and G3 are plotted with open triangles. The line represents the standard extinction curve for the B3 spectral types. The stars named CBN84431.8-455813 and CBN84446.0-45544 do not fall whereexpected according to their spectral types. They could be unresolvedvisual binaries. |
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Doing UBV and IR photometry and optical spectroscopy of the 63 OB spectral type stars found towards Bochum 7, we have:
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the directors and staff of CTIO and CASLEO for the use of their facilities. We also acknowledge the use, at CASLEO, of CCD and the data acquisition system partly financed by US NSF Grant AST-90-15827 to Dr. R.M. Rich. This research has received financial support from IALP and research grant PIP2240, CONICET. This publication makes use of data products from the Two Micron All Sky Survey, which is a joint project of the University of Massachusetts and the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center California Institute of Technology, funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the National Science Foundation. M.C. thanks Gustavo Medina-Tanco for helpful suggestions and Nidia Morrell for encouraging her to join this project and providing some of the stars' spectrographs. We would also like to thank the referee, Jesús Maíz-Apellániz, whose comments and suggestions helped to improve the final version of this paper.
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Figure 6: This figure includes stars with B0-1III and B0IIIe spectral types in the region of Bochum 7. 1. |
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Figure 7: This figure includes stars with B0-1V spectral types in the region of Bochum 7. 1. |
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Figure 8: This figure includes stars with B1-2V spectral types in the region of Bochum 7. 1. |
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Figure 9: This figure includes stars with B2-3V and B2Ve spectral types in the region of Bochum 7. 1. |
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Figure 10: This figure includes stars with B2III spectral types in the region of Bochum 7. 1. |
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Figure 11: This figure includes stars with B2IV-V spectral types in the region of Bochum 7. 1. |
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Figure 12: This figure includes stars with B3-5V spectral types in the region of Bochum 7. 1. |
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Figure 13: This figure includes stars with B5V spectral types in the region of Bochum 7. 1. |
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Figure 14: This figure includes stars with B5-8V spectral types in the region of Bochum 7. 1. |
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Figure 15: This figure includes stars with B8-9V and A0V spectral types in the region of Bochum 7. 1. |
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