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Session: Stars, Planets and the Interstellar Medium

Name: Dr. Manos Zapartas (National & Kapodistrian Univ. of Athens)
Coauthors: Bonanos Alceste (NOA)
de Wit Stephan (NOA)
Antoniadis Kostas (NOA)
Muñoz Sanchez Gonzalo (NOA)
Christodoulou Evangelia (NOA)
Maravelias Grigoris (NOA)
Fragos Tassos (University of Geneva)
Type: Oral
Title: Investigating the effect of mass loss of Red Supergiants in the Small Magellanic Cloud
Abstract:

Massive stars play an important role in astrophysics, shaping their environment during their life, and through their explosive deaths. However one of their main properties, their mass loss mechanism during the late stages of their evolution as Red Supergiants (RSGs) is still poorly understood and constrained, especially at low metallicities. Recently, Yang et al. (2023) provided an empirical prescription of mass loss during the RSG phase, based on the most complete and clean sample so far in the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC). We investigate the effect of this new mass-loss rate prescription, as well as others from literature, on stellar evolutionary models, using MESA code (e.g., Paxton et al. 2011). We have implemented these prescriptions in grids of single star models of SMC metallicity, that were generated with the population synthesis code POSYDON (Fragos et al. 2023). We compare the theoretically predicted surface properties of the RSGs with the observed ones, including their luminosity functions and their position in the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram. We find that the suggested high mass-loss rate of Yang et al. leads to extreme stripping of the envelope of the RSGs, leaving only a thin Hydrogen-rich layer above their cores, driving them to the hotter temperatures before their eventual death in a core-collapse event.