Infrared Excess of a Large OB Star Sample

Abstract

The infrared excess from OB stars are commonly considered as contributions from ionized stellar wind or circumstellar dust. With the newly published LAMOST-OB catalog and GOSSS data, this work steps further on understanding the infrared excess of OB stars. Based on a forward modeling approach comparing the spectral slope of observational Spectral Energy Distributions (SED) and photospheric models, 1147 stars are found to have infrared excess from 7818 stars with good-quality photometric data. After removing the objects in the sightline of dark clouds, 532 ($\sim 7\%$) B-type stars and 118 ($\sim 23\%$) O-type stars are identified to be true OB stars with circumstellar infrared excess emission. The ionized stellar wind model and the circumstellar dust model are adopted to explain the infrared excess, and Bayes Factors are computed to quantitatively compare the two. It is shown that the infrared excess can be accounted for by the stellar wind for about 65\% cases in which 33\% by free-free emission and 32\% by synchrotron radiation. Other 30\% sources could have and 4\% should have a dust component or other mechanisms to explain the sharply increase flux at $\lambda >10\mu$m. The parameters of dust model indicate a large-scale circumstellar halo structure which implies the origin of the dust from the birthplace of the OB stars. A statistical study suggests that the proportion with infrared excess in OB stars increases with stellar effective temperature and luminosity, and that there is no systematic change of the mechanism for infrared emission with stellar parameters.

Accepted for publication in the ApJ (July 13, 2022). 17 pages, 9 figures. Typos corrected, authors info updated

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