Fundamental parameters of B Supergiants from the BCD System

TL;DR

This paper presents a new calibration method for determining the effective temperatures of early-type B supergiants using the BCD spectrophotometric system, aiming for a more model-independent and accurate approach.

Contribution

It introduces a calibration of the (lambda1, D) parameters into Teff based on bolometric-flux method temperatures, reducing uncertainties and discrepancies in temperature estimates.

Findings

Calibration achieves ~0.05 relative uncertainty in Teff.

Effective temperatures agree within ~2000 K with literature values.

Wind-free non-LTE models may overestimate Teff by over 5000 K.

Abstract

Effective temperatures of early-type supergiants are important to test stellar atmosphere- and internal structure-models of massive and intermediate mass objects at different evolutionary phases. However, these Teff values are more or less discrepant depending on the method used to determine them. We aim to obtain a new calibration of the Teff parameter for early-type supergiants as a function of observational quantities that are highly sensitive to the ionization balance in the photosphere and its gas pressure, independent of the interstellar extinction, and as much as possible model-independent. The observational quantities that best address our aims are the (lambda1, D) parameters of the BCD spectrophotometric system. They describe the energy distribution around the Balmer discontinuity, which is highly sensitive to Teff and logg. We perform a calibration of the (lambda1, D) parameters into Teff using effective temperatures derived with the bolometric-flux method for 217 program stars, whose individual absolute relative uncertainties are on average 0.05. The final comparison of calculated with obtained Teff values in the (lambda1,D) calibration further show that the latter have total relative uncertainties, which on average are of the order of 0.05 for all spectral types and luminosity classes. The effective temperatures of OB supergiants derived in this work agree on average within some 2000 K with other determinations found in the literature, except those issued from wind-free non-LTE plane-parallel models of stellar atmospheres, which produce effective temperatures that can be overestimated by up to more than 5000 K near Teff = 25000 K.