Seminario: Maria Messineo (UniBo)

Titolo: Bright late-type stars in the thin Disk of the Milky Way

Abstract: Red supergiants (RSGs) and asymptotic giant branch (AGB) stars are the
brightest sources at infrared wavelengths, detectable at a distance
of a few  megaparsecs —- even in heavily obscured galactic centers.
Through winds and mass loss, they enrich and sculpt the interstellar
medium.
Despite similar spectral energy distributions and apparent magnitudes,
RSGs and AGBs trace distinct spatial structures of a galaxy.
AGBs trace well the gravitational potential, including the central bar,
and span ages from 50 Myr to a Hubble time. RSGs, aged 4.5–40 Myr, decorate
the spiral arms, the central molecular disk, and the bar’s endpoints.
The Milky Way offers the nearest laboratory for resolved stellar
populations
in a barred galaxy, however, dust obscuration and distance uncertainties
hinder
clean separation of RSGs and AGBs -— a critical step for mapping Disk
structure
and star-formation history.
Over the past several years, I have developed methods to estimate
extinction
by partitioning interstellar and circumstellar components, to obtain better
luminosity and to distinguish RSGs from AGBs. I will highlight key
challenges
and solutions, including extinction-free colors as interstellar
extinction proxies,
GLIMPSE color–color diagrams, and Gaia–2MASS criteria.
Finally, I will present a new Gaia catalog of ~700 bona fide optical RSGs,
detailing its construction, temperature, and luminosity characterization.