Astron. Astrophys. 332, 25-32 (1998)
7. Colour-colour-diagrams
In Fig. 4 several often-used colour-colour-diagrams are
plotted. In principle they can be used to distinguish between
oxygen-rich and carbon-rich objects. The lines in the
and colour diagram
indicate sequences for Galactic AGB stars that are based on our own
work in the case of and taken from van Loon et
al. (1997) for . There is at least a scatter of
1 magnitude around each of these relations, basically limiting the use
of these two colour-colour diagrams as O-/C-separators.
![[FIGURE]](img37.gif) |
Fig. 4. Colour-colour diagrams. Photometry with errorbars are plotted. Filled stars are known carbon-rich objects; open circles are known oxygen-rich stars. Upper limits on colours are not used. The solid and dashed lines represent the approximate loci of Galactic carbon- and oxygen-rich stars, respectively (see text). Numbers refer to the identification numbers in Table 1.
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The region where O-rich (indicated by O) and C-rich stars
(indicated by C) exist in the colour-colour
diagram is taken from Epchtein et al. (1987;
and in magnitudes). The region occupied by
C-stars in the diagram was determined by us
from Galactic AGB stars. In all these four diagrams the loci and
regions are valid for AGB stars with uninterrupted mass-loss. Post-AGB
stars, or AGB stars with detached dust shells, can occupy different
positions in these diagrams than indicated by their chemistry.
There are some obvious outliers, in particular the known
carbon-rich objects S2, S12 and S14 in the and
diagrams. S2 was suggested by WFMC to be a
possible post-AGB star and the colours are at least consistent with
that: the far-infrared dust shell is still red, but the near-infrared
colours are relatively blue. For S14 something similar may be the
case. Since S12 has a normal position in the
diagram, its unusual colour may be due an
overestimated 25 µm flux by a factor of 30. This is,
admittedly, an unusually large factor.
Based on the location in the colour-colour diagrams one may
hypotesize that S4, 16, 24 and 25 are carbon-rich and S27 and 28 are
oxygen-rich.
© European Southern Observatory (ESO) 1998
Online publication: March 10, 1998
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