Coravel Radial Velocities of Supergiants in the Small Magellanic Cloud

Abstract

Kinematical studies of the Magellanic Clouds began more than half a century ago, when Wilson, in 1918, first interpreted the gradient of the 17 radial velocities of gazeous nebulae in the Large Cloud in terms of rotation. In the case of the Small Magellanic Cloud, the first real attempt to understand the velocity field of this galaxy was performed by the Radcliffe astronomers (Feast et al., 1960, 1961). Their study was based on radial velocities of 40 stars and 13 HII regions.With the installation by ESO of an objective-prisme astrograph in South Africa, in 1961, and then of several larger telescopes in Chile in 1968, the number of measurements significantly increased for Magellanic objects, in particular in the SMC. In this galaxy, the objective-prism observations resulted in about 100 stellar radial velocities (Florsch, 1972a) of probable members. A compilation by Maurice (1979) of all then known slit-spectrograph radial velocities gave velocities for 80 supergiants, 35 HII regions and 12 planetary nebulae.