Color-temperature relations of M giants

After critically assessing three effective temperature scales for M giants, we adopted the relation of Dyck et al. for our models. Using empirical spectra of field M giants as a guide, we then calculated MARCS stellar atmosphere models (Gustafsson et al. 1975; Bell et al. 1976) and SSG synthetic spectra (Bell & Gustafsson 1978; Gustafsson & Bell 1979) of these cool stars, adjusting the band absorption oscillator strengths of the TiO bands to better reproduce the observational data.

The resulting synthetic spectra are found to be in very good agreement with the K-band spectra of stars of the appropriate spectral type taken from Kleinmann & Hall (1986) as well. Spectral types estimated from the strengths of the TiO bands and the depth of the band head of CO near 2.3 {mu}m quantitatively confirm that the synthetic spectra are good representations of those of field M giants. The broadband colors of the models match the field relations of K and early-M giants very well; for late-M giants, differences between the field star and synthetic colors are probably caused by the omission of spectral lines of VO and H_2_O in the spectrum synthesis calculations.