Identification of Carbon Stars from LAMOST DR7

Abstract

Carbon stars are excellent kinematic tracers of galaxies and play important roles in understanding the evolution of the Galaxy. Therefore, it is worthwhile to search for them in a large number of spectra. In this work, we build a new carbon star catalog based on the Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fiber Spectroscopy Telescope (LAMOST) DR7 spectra. The catalog contains 4542 spectra of 3546 carbon stars, identified through line index and near-infrared color–color diagrams. Through visual inspection of the spectra, we further subclassify them into 925 C–H, 384 C–R, 608 C–N, and 1292 Ba stars. However, 437 stars could not be subclassified due to their low signal-to-noise. Moreover, by comparing with the LAMOST DR7 pipeline we find 567 more carbon stars and visually subclassify them. We find that on the J − H versus H − K s two-color diagram, C–N stars can be reliably distinguished from the other three subtypes. Additionally, by utilizing the Gaia distance, we study the distribution of carbon stars in the H-R diagram and identify 258 dwarf carbon stars by the criterion M G > 5.0 mag. Finally, we present the spatial distribution in Galactic coordinates of the 3546 carbon stars. The majority of C–N, C–R, and Ba stars are distributed at low Galactic latitudes, while most C–H and dwarf carbon stars are distributed at high Galactic latitudes.