Effective temperatures of red supergiants estimated from line-depth ratios of iron lines in the YJ bands, 0.97--1.32 micron

TL;DR

This study introduces a line-depth ratio method using only Fe I lines in the YJ bands to accurately determine the effective temperatures of red supergiants, reducing uncertainties caused by their extended atmospheres.

Contribution

The paper presents an empirical LDR-Teff calibration using Fe I lines in the near-infrared, applicable to RSGs, and demonstrates its effectiveness with high-resolution spectra.

Findings

LDR-Teff relations calibrated with red giants work for RSGs.

Teff estimates agree with previous observations and stellar models.

No significant systematic bias found except for one line pair.

Abstract

Determining the effective temperatures (Teff) of red supergiants (RSGs) observationally is important in many fields of stellar physics and galactic astronomy, yet some significant difficulties remain due to model uncertainty originating majorly in the extended atmosphere of RSGs. Here we propose the line-depth ratio (LDR) method in which we use only Fe I lines. As opposed to the conventional LDR method with lines of multiple species involved, the LDR of this kind is insensitive to the surface gravity effects and expected to circumvent the uncertainty originating in the upper atmosphere of RSGs. Therefore, the LDR--Teff relations that we calibrated empirically with red giants may be directly applied to RSGs, though various differences, e.g., caused by the three-dimensional non-LTE effects, between the two groups of objects need to be kept in mind. Using the near-infrared YJ-band spectra of nine well-known solar-metal red giants observed with the WINERED high-resolution spectrograph, we selected 12 pairs of Fe I lines least contaminated with other lines. Applying their LDR--Teff relations to ten nearby RSGs, the resultant Teff with the internal precision of 30--70 K shows good agreement with previous observational results assuming one-dimensional LTE and with Geneva's stellar evolution model. We found no evidence of significant systematic bias caused by various differences, including those in the size of the non-LTE effects, between red giants and RSGs except for one line pair which we rejected because the non-LTE effects may be as large as ~250 K. Nevertheless, it is difficult to evaluate the systematic bias, and further study is required, e.g., with including the three-dimensional non-LTE calculations of all the lines involved.