Thursday, 7 June 2018

astrophysics - What is the frequency of occurrence of stellar classifications off the HR main-sequence?


An alternative version of this question would be: "if was to pick a star from the $10^{11}$ or so in our galaxy at random, what are the probabilities of it being various kinds of star?" (and I do mean "in our galaxy" and not "visible in the night sky").



There is a nice table I've seen in various places (e.g wikipedia) which goes a long way towards answering this. It tells me that 0.00003% are 'O' types and 0.13% 'B' and 0.6% 'A' through to the 76% rump of 'M types. Unfortunately there is some small print associated with that table which is that it's only for stars on the main sequence (hence its 'M' types are all low-luminosity dwarfs - red giants aren't included - and its 'A's and 'B's are all young giants - white dwarfs aren't included).


However, I've no idea what proportion of the stellar population are off the main sequence. One in a hundred? One in a million ? What I'd really like to find (or gain enough information to compile) is a 2D version of that table with the same axes as a HR diagram where I can look up the frequency of white dwarfs by looking in the cells in the A-B spectral and the luminosity 0.001 - 0.1 ranges, or the frequency of stars like Betelgeuse by looking in the M, $10^5$ cell.


(Of course another issue with the cited table is that it claims to be frequencies in "solar neighbourhood". For example it'd be nice to have different versions specific to stellar populations of, say, globular clusters, the galactic disk and central "bulge". But I'll settle for some pan-galactic numbers initially).




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