Pulsator cool supergiants in the MCs

As candidate supergiant objects, and one of the few classes of pulsating evolved massive stars, these objects have incredible potential to change our understanding of the structure and evolution of massive stars. Here we examine the lightcurves of a sample of 126 cool supergiants in the Magellanic Clouds observed by the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite in order to identify pulsating stars.

After making quality cuts and filtering out contaminant objects, we examine the distribution of pulsating stars in the Hertzprung-Russel (HR) diagram, and find that FYPS occupy a region above logL/L_{sun}_>~5.0. This luminosity boundary corresponds to stars with initial masses of ~18-20M_{sun}_, consistent with the most massive red supergiant progenitors of supernovae (SNe) II-P, as well as the observed properties of SNe IIb progenitors.