The Properties of Fast Yellow Pulsating Supergiants: FYPS Point the Way to Missing Red Supergiants

Abstract

Fast yellow pulsating supergiants (FYPS) are a recently-discovered class of evolved massive pulsator. As candidate post-red supergiant objects, and one of the few classes of pulsating evolved massive stars, these objects have incredible potential to change our understanding of the structure and evolution of massive stars. Here we examine the lightcurves of a sample of 126 cool supergiants in the Magellanic Clouds observed by the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (\tess~) in order to identify pulsating stars. After making quality cuts and filtering out contaminant objects, we examine the distribution of pulsating stars in the Hertzprung-Russel (HR) diagram, and find that FYPS occupy a region above $\log L/L_{\odot }\gtrsim 5.0$. This luminosity boundary corresponds to stars with initial masses of $\sim$18-20 $M_{\odot }$, consistent with the most massive red supergiant progenitors of supernovae (SNe) II-P, as well as the observed properties of SNe IIb progenitors. This threshold is in agreement with the picture that FYPS are post-RSG stars. Finally, we characterize the behavior of FYPS pulsations as a function of their location in the HR diagram. We find low frequency pulsations at higher effective temperatures, higher frequency pulsations at lower temperatures, with a transition between the two behaviors at intermediate temperatures. The observed properties of FYPS make them fascinating objects for future theoretical study.

Consistent with published version which contains significantly improved detection and rejection of contaminant objects. Comments welcome

References in corpus (39)

• The NumPy array: a structure for efficient numerical computation
• The Gaia mission
• The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite
• A grid of MARCS model atmospheres for late-type stars I. Methods and general properties
• Binary interaction dominates the evolution of massive stars
• Binary Population and Spectral Synthesis Version 2.1: construction, observational verification and new results
• astroquery: An Astronomical Web-Querying Package in Python
• The death of massive stars - I. Observational constraints on the progenitors of type II-P supernovae
• Observational constraints on the progenitors of core-collapse supernovae : the case for missing high mass stars
• Southern Massive Stars at High Angular Resolution: Observational Campaign and Companion Detection
• The VLT-FLAMES Survey of Massive Stars: Observations centered on the Magellanic Cloud clusters NGC 330, NGC 346, NGC 2004, and the N11 region
• Internal mixing of rotating stars inferred from dipole gravity modes
• Low-frequency gravity waves in blue supergiants revealed by high-precision space photometry
• The Initial Masses of the Red Supergiant Progenitors to Type-II Supernovae
• iPTF13bvn: The First Evidence of a Binary Progenitor for a Type Ib Supernova
• Possible binary progenitors for the type Ib supernova iPTF13bvn
• Photometric detection of internal gravity waves in upper main-sequence stars. II. Combined TESS photometry and high-resolution spectroscopy
• A Cool and Inflated Progenitor Candidate for the Type Ib Supernova 2019yvr at 2.6 Years Before Explosion
• Grids of stellar models with rotation VI: Models from 0.8 to 120 $M_{\odot }$ at a metallicity Z = 0.006
• A new survey of cool supergiants in the Magellanic Clouds
• On the Origin of Stochastic, Low-Frequency Photometric Variability in Massive Stars
• On The Red Supergiant Problem
• Pulsation among TESS A and B stars and the Maia variables
• How much hydrogen is in Type Ib and IIb supernova progenitors?
• Quantitative spectroscopy of Deneb
• Gaussian Process modelling of granulation and oscillations in red-giant stars
• The Luminosity Function of Red Supergiants in M31
• Type II supernovae from the Carnegie Supernova Project-I. III. Understanding SN II diversity through correlations between physical and observed properties
• Numerical experiments to help understand cause and effect in massive star evolution
• Exploring the Mass Loss Histories of the Red Supergiants
• An environmental analysis of the Type Ib SN 2019yvr and the possible presence of an inflated binary companion
• Stochastic light variations in hot stars from wind instability: Finding photometric signatures and testing against the TESS data
• Evolved Massive Stars at Low-metallicity III. A Source Catalog for the Large Magellanic Cloud
• Binary Red Supergiants II: Discovering and Characterizing B-type Companions
• Short Term Variability of Evolved Massive Stars with TESS II: A New Class of Cool, Pulsating Supergiants
• The Candidate Progenitor Companion Star of the Type Ib/c SN 2013ge
• Blue supergiants as tests for stellar physics
• Combined asteroseismology, spectroscopy, and astrometry of the CoRoT B2V target HD 170580
• Revisiting the evolved hypergiants in the Magellanic Clouds