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Synthetic HR-diagrams for massive stars

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Abstract

Observations of luminous stars are compared to synthetic HR diagrams generated from three sets of evolutionary models with different treatment of mass loss, convective overshoot, and considering or not variations in the opacity due to heavy elements. We take into account also different values for the slope of the initial mass function, and the possibility that a fraction of the earliest spectral type stars is missing either because of photometric incompleteness or because they spend part of their Main-Sequence lifetime being not visible as still embedded in their parental cloud (shortly abbreviated as phase of invisibility). The statistical comparison between theory and observations is performed by means of a two-dimensional Kolmogorov-Smirnov test. Models computed taking into account a moderate opacity enhancement in the region of the CNO ionization, in addition to mass loss and convective overshoot, can be accepted at the 95% significance level. However, even in this case, the distribution of luminous stars in the HR diagram can be fitted only adopting an initial mass function slightly steeper than the Salpter one, and supposing that a fraction of the luminous stars are still not included in our counts either by photometric incompleteness of the data or intrinsic invisibility. On the contrary, the other models that incorporate mass loss and convective overshoot only, can be rejected at better than 95% confidence under any assumption for the IMF slope and fraction of missing stars.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Astronomical Observatory, Padova, Italy

    E. Nasi

  2. Unita' di Ricerca di Padova, GNA-CNR, Italy

    C. Forieri

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  1. E. Nasi
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  2. C. Forieri
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Nasi, E., Forieri, C. Synthetic HR-diagrams for massive stars. Astrophys Space Sci 166, 229–258 (1990). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01094896

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