A Million Red Supergiants with Roman
| Program ID | 19073 |
|---|---|
| Science Category | Stellar Populations |
| Program Type | Analysis |
| Category | Small |
| Principal Investigator | Aswin Suresh |
| PI Institution | Northwestern University |
| Co-Investigators |
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| Abstract | The deaths of massive stars are consequential events in the universe, contributing to the cosmic dust budget and seeding compact object formation. As the most common terminal state of massive stars, Red supergiants (RSGs) are the progenitors of the majority of core-collapse Supernovae (SNe) and exhibit a plethora of possible terminal stages, mainly influenced by mass loss in their final centuries. Understanding the nature of eruptive mass loss from RSGs as precursor emission before SNe and probing direct collapse of RSGs into black holes are major open problems in stellar evolution, having far-reaching consequences for the diversity of core-collapse SNe and the compact object mass function. We propose to utilize the deep, wide-field imaging by the Roman High Latitude Wide Area Survey (HLWAS) to catalog over a million RSGs in 500 galaxies within 30 Mpc, forming a homogeneous, multi-band dataset to characterize precursor emission and mass-loss in terminal RSGs. This program is synergistic with high cadence Rubin LSST observations of the southern sky, capturing SNe resulting from RSGs in our catalog. We will also make use of galaxies that lie within the High Latitude Time Domain Survey (HLTDS) or have complementary archival observations by HST and/or JWST to characterize multi-epoch Spectral Energy Distributions (SEDs) of RSGs and luminous stellar populations to disentangle the roles of binarity and host environment on their evolution. Roman core community surveys present an unprecedented opportunity to systematically probe massive stellar evolution, and this program positions the community to capitalize on the upcoming decade of SNe discoveries by Rubin. |