# A catalog of known Galactic K-M stars of class I, candidate RSGs, in Gaia DR2

## TL;DR

This paper uses Gaia DR2 data to identify and analyze the distances and luminosities of 889 candidate red supergiants, confirming 43 as highly probable RSGs and providing insights into their mass distribution.

## Contribution

It provides a catalog of known Galactic K-M class I stars with refined distances and luminosities, identifying probable red supergiants using Gaia DR2 data.

## Key findings

- 43 stars are highly probable red supergiants with Mbol<-7.1 mag
- 43% of the sample have masses > 7 Msun
- 30% of the sample are giant stars

## Abstract

We investigate individual distances and luminosities of a sample of 889 nearby candidate red supergiants with reliable parallaxes (plx/plxerr > 4 and RUWE < 2.7) from Gaia DR2. The sample was extracted from the historical compilation of spectroscopically derived spectral types by Skiff (2014), and consists of K-M stars that are listed with class I at least once. The sample includes well-known red supergiants from Humphreys (1978), Elias et al. (1985), Jura and Kleinmann (1990), and Levesque et al. (2005). Infrared and optical measurements from the 2MASS, CIO, MSX, WISE, MIPSGAL, GLIMPSE, and NOMAD catalogs allow us to estimate the stellar bolometric magnitudes. We analyze the stars in the luminosity versus effective temperature plane and confirm that 43 sources are highly-probably red supergiants with Mbol<-7.1 mag. 43% of the sample is made of stars with masses > 7 Msun. Another 30% of the sample consists of giant stars.