NEW OPPORTUNITIES FOR SEARCHING FOR MAGNETIC STAR CANDIDATES

Abstract

Spectropolarimetric observations required for direct measurement of stellar magnetic fields are technically complex and require a large amount of observation time. This fact is an obstacle to a large-scale search for new magnetic chemically peculiar stars. To improve the efficiency of the search for such objects, a reliable preliminary selection of candidates is necessary, which is traditionally based on the identification of characteristic photometric patterns and anomalies in the chemical composition. Recently, a new approach was proposed — selection by features of line splitting in unpolarized infrared spectra associated with the Zeeman effect. In this work, observations of 18 stars selected by these features were carried out using the Main Stellar Spectrograph on the 6-m telescope. As a result, the presence of a magnetic field was reliably confirmed for 15 objects, which demonstrates the high efficiency of the proposed selection criterion and opens up new opportunities for searching for magnetic star candidates.