The Stripped-Star Ultraviolet Magellanic Cloud Survey (SUMS): The UV Photometric Catalog and Stripped Star Candidate Selection

TL;DR

The SUMS survey provides a comprehensive UV catalog of the Magellanic Clouds, enabling the identification of candidate stripped stars to advance understanding of binary evolution and massive star populations.

Contribution

This study introduces the first large-scale UV survey of the Magellanic Clouds with a catalog of nearly 735,000 sources, and identifies candidate stripped stars using UV excess detection.

Findings

Identified 522 candidate stripped stars in the LMC.

Detected 298 candidate stripped stars in the SMC.

Validated the photometry pipeline and catalog's broad applicability.

Abstract

Most massive stars will interact with a binary companion during their lifetimes. These interactions can remove the hydrogen-rich envelope, producing intermediate-mass ($\sim$2-8 M$_\odot$) and helium-rich stars. These "stripped stars" are predicted to emit predominantly in the ultraviolet (UV) and can therefore be identified via a UV excess provided they are not outshone by their companion. However, despite their importance to binary evolution, supernovae, and ionizing feedback, few stripped stars have been confirmed. This is likely due to the scarcity of wide-field, high angular resolution, UV surveys of stellar populations with reliable distances and extinction estimates. To address this, we present the Stripped-Star Ultraviolet Magellanic Clouds Survey (SUMS) catalog. We use the Tractor forward modeling software to perform PSF photometry on 2,420 Swift-UVOT images of the LMC and SMC. The resulting public catalog contains 734,869 sources in three UV filters to a depth of $\sim$20 Vega mag. We perform validation tests on the photometry pipeline and highlight the catalog's broad applicability. We then identify sources with excess UV light compared to main-sequence stars and apply a series of quality cuts. From this, we identify 522 candidate stripped stars in the LMC and 298 in the SMC. We assess the potential contamination from other UV excess systems and argue the dominant uncertainty to be dust: early main-sequence stars can mimic the colors of stripped star binaries when extinction is overcorrected. This survey lays the groundwork for the first systematic census of stripped stars and opens new windows into binary evolution and massive star populations.