activity
20102026
most citedA panchromatic view of the restless SN2009ip reveals the explosive ejection of a massive star envelope

253 citations · 1.4k across the 47 of their papers we have counts for

collaborators

49 papers

astro-ph.SR2026

An Orbit for a Massive Wolf-Rayet Binary in the LMC: An Example of Binary Evolution

Breelyn Cocke, Philip Massey, Nidia I. Morrell +6

Wolf-Rayet (WR) stars are helium-burning, evolved massive stars which have had most of their hydrogen-rich outer layers removed either through stellar winds and/or binary stripping…

astro-ph.SR2025

The Stellar Content of NGC~3603 Revisited: Is the IMF Top Heavy?

Philip Massey, Nidia I. Morrell, Kathryn F. Neugent +3

Studies of the resolved stellar populations of young massive clusters have shown that the slope of the initial mass function appears to be the same everywhere, with no dependence o…

astro-ph.SR2025

A New Determination of the Mass of NGC 3603-A1: the Most Massive Binary Known?

Philip Massey, Sarah Bodansky, Laura R. Penny +2

The star NGC 3603-A1 has long been known to be a very massive binary, consisting of a pair of O2-3If*/WN5-6 stars, which show Wolf-Rayet-like emission due to their luminosities bei…

astro-ph.SR2024

The Nature of a Recently Discovered Wolf-Rayet Binary: Archetype of Stripping?

Philip Massey, Kathryn F. Neugent, Nidia I. Morrell +2

LMCe055-1 was recently discovered in a survey for WRs in the Large Magellanic Cloud, and classified as a WN4/O4, a lower excitation version of the WN3/O3 class discovered as part o…

astro-ph.SR2024

Binary Yellow Supergiants in the Magellanic Clouds I: Photometric Candidate Identification

Anna J. G. O'Grady, Maria R. Drout, Kathryn F. Neugent +3

Recent works have constrained the binary fraction of evolved populations of massive stars in local galaxies such as red supergiants and Wolf-Rayet stars, but the binary fraction of…

astro-ph.SR2023

Physical Properties of 5,000 Cool LMC Supergiants with Gaia XP Spectra: A Detailed Portrait of the Upper HR Diagram Hints at Missing Supernova Progenitors

Trevor Z. Dorn-Wallenstein, Kathryn F. Neugent, Emily M. Levesque

Characterizing the physical properties of cool supergiants allows us to probe the final stages of a massive star's evolution before it undergoes core collapse. Despite their import…

astro-ph.GA2023★ 1 cited

Where do stars explode in the ISM? -- The distribution of dense gas around evolved massive stars in M33

Sumit K. Sarbadhicary, Jordan Wagner, Eric W. Koch +27

The effect of supernovae (SNe) on star-formation in the interstellar medium (ISM) depends sensitively on where SNe explode with respect to ISM clouds. Observationally, SN ISM envir…

astro-ph.GA2023★ 10 cited

Newly Discovered Wolf-Rayet Stars in M31

Kathryn F. Neugent, Philip Massey

The evolved massive star populations of the Local Group galaxies are generally thought to be well-understood. However, recent work suggested that the Wolf-Rayet (WR) content of M31…

astro-ph.SR2023★ 6 cited

Constraints on the Binarity of the WN3/O3 Class of Wolf-Rayet Stars

Philip Massey, Kathryn F. Neugent, Nidia I. Morrell

The WN3/O3 Wolf-Rayet (WR) stars were discovered as part of our survey for WRs in the Magellanic Clouds. The WN3/O3s show the emission lines of a high-excitation WN star and the ab…

astro-ph.HE2022★ 1 cited

A Multiwavelength Study of the Massive Colliding Wind Binary WR 20a: A Possible Progenitor for Fast-Spinning LIGO Binary Black Hole Mergers

Grace M. Olivier, Laura A. Lopez, Katie Auchettl +7

WR 20a is the most massive close-in binary known in our Galaxy. It is composed of two 80 M Wolf-Rayet stars with a short period of 3.7 days in the open cl…

astro-ph.SR2022

A Survey for C II Emission-Line Stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud. II. Final Results and the Origin of C II Emission in [WC] Spectra

Bruce Margon, Nidia Morrell, Philip Massey +2

We present the final results of an imaging and spectroscopic search for stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) with C II 7231, 7236 emission lines. The goal is to identify and s…

astro-ph.SR2022★ 38 cited

The Time-Averaged Mass-Loss Rates of Red Supergiants As Revealed by their Luminosity Functions in M31 and M33

Philip Massey, Kathryn F. Neugent, Sylvia Ekstrom +2

Mass-loss in red supergiants (RSGs) is generally recognized to be episodic, but mass-loss prescriptions fail to reflect this. Evolutionary models show that the total amount of mass…

astro-ph.SR2022★ 14 cited

Cool, Luminous, and Highly Variable Stars in the Magellanic Clouds. II: Spectroscopic and Environmental Analysis of Thorne-Żytkow Object and Super-AGB Star Candidates

Anna J. G. O'Grady, Maria R. Drout, B. M. Gaensler +9

In previous work we identified a population of 38 cool and luminous variable stars in the Magellanic Clouds and examined 11 in detail in order to classify them as either Thorne-Żyt…

astro-ph.SR2022

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

Trevor Z. Dorn-Wallenstein, Emily M. Levesque, James R. A. Davenport +3

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 pulsat…

astro-ph.SR2022★ 33 cited

WO-Type Wolf-Rayet Stars: the Last Hurrah of Massive Star Evolution

Erin Aadland, Philip Massey, D. John Hillier +3

Are WO-type Wolf Rayet (WR) stars in the final stage of massive star evolution before core-collapse? Although WC- and WO-type WRs have very similar spectra, WOs show a much stronge…

astro-ph.SR2021

Locating Red Supergiants in the Galaxy NGC 6822

Tzvetelina A. Dimitrova, Kathryn F. Neugent, Philip Massey +1

Using archival near-IR photometry, we identify 51 of the K-band brightest red supergiants (RSGs) in NGC 6822 and compare their physical properties with stellar evolutionary model p…

astro-ph.SR2021★ 1 cited

Testing Evolutionary Models with Red Supergiant and Wolf-Rayet Populations

Philip Massey, Kathryn F. Neugent, Trevor Z. Dorn-Wallenstein +3

Despite the many successes that modern massive star evolutionary theory has enjoyed, reproducing the apparent trend in the relative number of red supergiants (RSGs) and Wolf-Rayet…

astro-ph.GA2020★ 30 cited

The Red Supergiant Binary Fraction as a Function of Metallicity in M31 and M33

Kathryn F. Neugent

Recent work measuring the binary fraction of evolved red supergiants (RSGs) in the Magellanic Clouds points to a value between 15-30%, with the majority of the companions being un-…

astro-ph.SR2020★ 40 cited

The Red Supergiant Content of M31 and M33

Philip Massey, Kathryn F. Neugent, Emily M. Levesque +2

We identify red supergiants (RSGs) in our spiral neighbors M31 and M33 using near-IR (NIR) photometry complete to a luminosity limit of log L/Lo=4.0. Our archival survey data cover…

astro-ph.SR2020★ 27 cited

Short Term Variability of Evolved Massive Stars with TESS II: A New Class of Cool, Pulsating Supergiants

Trevor Z. Dorn-Wallenstein, Emily M. Levesque, Kathryn F. Neugent +3

Massive stars briefly pass through the yellow supergiant (YSG) phase as they evolve redward across the HR diagram and expand into red supergiants (RSGs). Higher-mass stars pass thr…

astro-ph.SR2020

The Red Supergiant Binary Fraction of the Large Magellanic Cloud

Kathryn F. Neugent, Emily M. Levesque, Philip Massey +2

The binary fraction of unevolved massive stars is thought to be 70-100% but there are few observational constraints on the binary fraction of the evolved version of a subset of the…

astro-ph.SR2020★ 7 cited

A Survey for C II Emission-Line Stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud

Bruce Margon, Philip Massey, Kathryn F. Neugent +1

We present a narrow-band imaging survey of the Large Magellanic Cloud, designed to isolate the C II 7231, 7236 emission lines in objects as faint as . Th…

astro-ph.SR2019★ 40 cited

The Luminosity Function of Red Supergiants in M31

Kathryn F. Neugent, Philip Massey, Cyril Georgy +5

The mass-loss rates of red supergiant stars (RSGs) are poorly constrained by direct measurements, and yet the subsequent evolution of these stars depends critically on how much mas…

astro-ph.SR2019

The Wolf-Rayet Content of the Galaxies of the Local Group and Beyond

Kathryn F. Neugent, Philip Massey

Wolf-Rayet stars (WRs) represent the end of a massive star's life as it is about to turn into a supernova. Obtaining complete samples of such stars across a large range of metallic…