New R Coronae Borealis stars discovered in OGLE-III Galactic Bulge fields from their mid- and near- infrared properties

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new infrared-based technique to identify R Coronae Borealis stars, successfully discovering two new stars and proposing four candidates, enhancing understanding of their distribution in the Galactic Bulge.

Contribution

The study develops and validates a novel infrared emission technique for detecting RCB stars without light curve analysis, applicable in high-extinction regions.

Findings

Discovered two new RCB stars in OGLE-III fields.

Re-discovered all 7 known RCB stars in the surveyed fields.

Proposed four new RCB star candidates.

Abstract

An R Coronae Borealis (RCB) star is a rare type of supergiant star that is increasingly thought to be the evolved merger product of two white dwarfs. Recently, many of them have been found distributed in a thin disk structure embedded inside the Galactic Bulge. This unexpected high density can give us more insight into the nature and age of RCB stars. We applied and tested successfully a new technique to find RCB stars based on the particular infrared emission. We demonstrated that RCB stars can now be found without the need of a light curve analysis, and therefore outside optically monitored fields. The selection of RCB candidates was based on their near-infrared excess and on particular mid-infrared emission of RCB shells, using photometric data from the 2MASS and Spitzer/GLIMPSE surveys. The OGLE light curves of all RCB candidates were then inspected visually and the ones presenting large and fast declines were followed-up spectroscopically . We discovered two new R Coronae Borealis stars, but also propose four new candidates. We stress that all of the 7 known RCB stars located in both Spitzer/GLIMPSE and OGLE-III fields were re-discovered, which indicates the high efficiency of our analysis. The proposed new technique to find RCB stars has been successful. It can now be extented to larger area, specially where the instellar extinction is too high to have been monitored by microlensing surveys, i.e the inner part of the Galactic Bulge.