Physical parameters of IPHAS-selected classical Be stars. (I. Determination procedure and evaluation of the results.)

TL;DR

This paper introduces a semi-automatic method using the BCD spectrophotometric system to determine physical parameters of classical Be stars from the IPHAS survey, aiming to use these stars as tracers of galactic structure.

Contribution

It develops and validates a new procedure for deriving fundamental parameters of Be stars, and applies it to study the galactic structure in the Perseus arm region.

Findings

Validated the procedure against independent techniques.

Found no significant clustering of Be stars at expected arm positions.

Confirmed previous results regarding galactic structure in the studied area.

Abstract

We present a semi-automatic procedure to obtain fundamental physical parameters and distances of classical Be (CBe) stars, based on the Barbier-Chalonge-Divan (BCD) spectrophotometric system. Our aim is to apply this procedure to a large sample of CBe stars detected by the IPHAS photometric survey, to determine their fundamental physical parameters and to explore their suitability as galactic structure tracers. In this paper we describe the methodology used and the validation of the procedure by comparing our results with those obtained from different independent astrophysical techniques for subsamples of stars in common with other studies. We also present a test case study of the galactic structure in the direction of the Perseus Galactic Arm, in order to compare our results with others recently obtained with different techniques and the same sample of stars. We did not find any significant clustering of stars at the expected positions of the Perseus and Outer Galactic Arms, in agreement with previous studies in the same area that we used for verification.