The WFI Halpha spectroscopic survey

Martayan, Christophe; Baade, Dietrich; Fabregat, Juan

The WFI Halpha spectroscopic survey

Authors

Martayan, Christophe

Baade, Dietrich

Fabregat, Juan

Description

This document presents the results from our spectroscopic survey of Halpha emitters in galactic and SMC open clusters with the ESO Wide Field Imager in its slitless spectroscopic mode. First of all, for the galactic open cluster NGC6611, in which, the number and the nature of emission line stars is still the object of debates, we show that the number of true circumstellar emission line stars is small. Second, at low metallicity, typically in the Small Magellanic Cloud, B-type stars rotate faster than in the Milky Way and thus it is expected a larger number of Be stars. However, till now, search for Be stars was only performed in a very small number of open clusters in the Magellanic Clouds. Using the ESO/WFI in its slitless spectroscopic mode, we performed a Halpha survey of the Small Magellanic Cloud. 3 million low-resolution spectra centered on Halpha were obtained in the whole SMC. Here, we present the method to exploit the data and first results for 84 open clusters in the SMC about the ratios of Be stars to B stars.
proceedings SF2A2008, PNPS session