HARPSpol magnetic massive stars

One of the objectives of the MiMeS project is to provide stringent observational constraints on the magnetic fields of massive stars; however, identification of magnetic massive stars is challenging, as only a few percent of high-mass stars host strong fields detectable with the current instrumentation.

Hence, one of the first objectives of the MiMeS project was to search for magnetic objects among a large sample of massive stars, and to build a sub-sample for in-depth follow-up studies required to test the models and theories of fossil field origins, magnetic wind confinement and magnetospheric properties, and magnetic star evolution. We obtained high-resolution spectropolarimetric observations of a large number of OB stars thanks to three large programs (LP) of observations that have been allocated on the high-resolution spectropolarimeters ESPaDOnS, Narval, and the polarimetric module HARPSpol of the HARPS spectrograph.