Blue Supergiants as a Tool for Extragalactic Distances — Theoretical Concepts

Abstract

Because of their enormous intrinsic brightness blue supergiants are ideal stellar objects to be studied spectroscopically as individuals in galaxies far beyond the Local Group. Quantitative spectroscopy by means of efficient multi-object spectrographs attached to 8m-class telescopes and modern NLTE model atmosphere techniques allow us to determine not only intrinsic stellar parameters such as effective temperature, surface gravity, chemical composition and absolute magnitude but also very accurately interstellar reddening and extinction. This is a significant advantage compared to classical distance indicators like Cepheids and RR Lyrae. We describe the spectroscopic diagnostics of blue supergiants and introduce two concepts to determine absolute magnitudes. The first one (Wind Momentum — Luminosity Relationship) uses the correlation between observed stellar wind momentum and luminosity, whereas the second one (Flux-weighted Gravity—Luminosity Relationship) relies only on the determination of effective temperature and surface gravity to yield an accurate estimate of absolute magnitude. We discuss the potential of these two methods.