Mass-loss Rate of Highly Evolved Stars in the Magellanic Clouds

Abstract

Asymptotic giant branch stars (AGBs) and red supergiant stars (RSGs) exhibit significant mass-loss phenomena and are considered important sources of interstellar dust. In this work, we employed a uniform method of spectral energy distribution fitting to analyze a large, and hence statistically significant, sample of approximately 40,000 RSGs and AGBs in the Magellanic Clouds (MCs), providing a new catalog of evolved stars that includes stellar parameters and dust properties. Our results reveal that the total dust-production rate (DPR) of the Large Magellanic Cloud is approximately 9.69 × 10 ^−6 M _☉ yr ^−1 , while it is around 1.75 × 10 ^−6 M _☉ yr ^−1 for the Small Magellanic Cloud, with a few stars significantly contributing to the total DPR. No significant differences were observed in the contributions to DPR from carbon-rich and oxygen-rich (O-rich) evolved stars in the MCs. We explored the relations between stellar parameters (luminosity, infrared color, period, amplitude) and mass-loss rate (MLR) for evolved stars. A prominent turning point at $\mathrm{log}(L/{L}_{\odot })\approx 4.4$ appears in the luminosity–MLR diagram of RSGs, potentially related to their mass-loss mechanism. The luminosity–MLR relation of AGBs is highly scattered. The DPR of AGBs shows a clear change with pulsation period and amplitude, with DPR exhibiting a drastic increase at pulsation periods of approximately 300 days and I -band amplitudes greater than 0.5 mag. Metallicity has some impact on the DPR of O-rich stars, with lower metallicity seeming to result in lower mean DPR and a higher proportion of optically thin stars.

Keywords

• Red supergiant stars
• Asymptotic giant branch stars
• Stellar mass loss
• Circumstellar dust
• Magellanic Clouds