English

A New Luminous blue variable in the outskirt of the Andromeda Galaxy

Solar and Stellar Astrophysics 2019-10-09 v1 Astrophysics of Galaxies

Abstract

The hot massive luminous blue variables (LBVs) represent an important evolutionary phase of massive stars. Here, we report the discovery of a new LBV -- LAMOST J0037+4016 in the distant outskirt of the Andromeda galaxy. It is located in the south-western corner (a possible faint spiral arm) of M31 with an unexpectedly large projection distance of \sim 22 kpc from the center. The optical light curve shows a 1.2 mag variation in VV band and its outburst and quiescence phases both last over several years. The observed spectra indicate an A-type supergiant at epoch close to the outburst phase and a hot B-type supergiant with weak [Fe II] emission lines at epoch of much dimmer brightness. The near-infrared color-color diagram further shows it follows the distribution of Galactic and M31 LBVs rather than B[e] supergiants. All the existing data strongly show that LAMOST J0037+4016 is an LBV. By spectral energy distribution fitting, we find it has a luminosity (4.42±1.644.42 \pm 1.64)×105\times 10^5 LL_{\odot} and an initial mass 30\sim 30 MM_{\odot}, indicating its nature of less luminosity class of LBV.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1909.04832,
  title  = {A New Luminous blue variable in the outskirt of the Andromeda Galaxy},
  author = {Yang Huang and Huaiwei Zhang and Chun Wang and Bingqiu Chen and Yangwei Zhang and Jincheng Guo and Haibo Yuan and Maosheng Xiang and Zhijia Tian and Guangxing Li and Xiaowei Liu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1909.04832},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

7 pages, 4 figures, 3 tables, accepted by ApJL