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Lookup NU author(s): Pieterjan Van Daele, Dr Dominic BowmanORCiD, Jan HennecoORCiD, Ankur Kalita
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
Massive stars, the progenitors of neutron stars and black holes, play a crucial role in shaping the chemical and radiative properties of entire galaxies through their winds and explosive deaths. Stellar pulsations are a common phenomenon in massive stars and asteroseismology – the study of such pulsations – provides crucial constraints on the physics of massive star interiors. The excitation of heat-driven pulsations in massive stars is expected to depend on a star’s metallicity, but this remains largely uncalibrated in evolution models due to a lack of a sufficient observations. While Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has dramatically improved the statistics for Galactic massive stars, obtaining TESS light curves for low-metallicity massive stars beyond the Milky Way is challenging, due to their faintness and heavy crowding. In this paper, we present a novel point-spread-function-based light-curve extraction method called LEMONS, which overcomes these challenges. We also demonstrate the limitations of the often-used simple aperture photometry method that can provide heavily contaminated light curves. With this new technique, accurate light curves of 91 Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) massive stars in the Binarity at LOw Metallicity sample are extracted. They reveal a variety of variability types including indications of binarity (e.g. eclipses and ellipsoidal modulation) and stellar pulsations. They also enable us to investigate stochastic low-frequency (SLF) variability for massive stars in the SMC. Furthermore, we demonstrate how the morphology of SLF variability probes a star’s location in the Hertzsprung–Russell diagram, which appears similar to Galactic massive stars thus indicating that the underlying physical mechanism could be insensitive to metallicity.
Author(s): Van Daele PJ, Bowman DM, Ovadia R, Katabi Z, Bodensteiner J, Shenar T, Langer N, Henneco J, Kalita A, Crowther PA, Gull M, Mahy L, Patrick L, Pauli D, Pawlak M
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Year: 2026
Volume: 550
Issue: 2
Pages: 20
Print publication date: 01/08/2026
Online publication date: 13/06/2026
Acceptance date: 09/06/2026
Date deposited: 24/07/2026
ISSN (print): 0035-8711
ISSN (electronic): 1365-2966
Publisher: Oxford University Press
URL: https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stag1131
DOI: 10.1093/mnras/stag1131
Data Access Statement: The TESS data presented in this paper were obtained from the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST; https://archive.stsci.edu/missions-and-data/tess). This research made use of astropy (Astropy Collaboration 2013), matplotlib (J. D. Hunter 2007), numpy (C. R. Harris et al. 2020), Pandas (W. McKinney 2010), Lightkurve (Lightkurve Collaboration 2018), TESScut (C. E. Brasseur et al. 2019), Photutils (L. Bradley et al. 2022), and Period04 (P. Lenz & M. Breger 2005).
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