Abstract

The incidence of magnetic fields in massive stars: An overview of the MiMeS Survey Component

Jason Grunhut (Royal Military College of Canada)

Gregg Wade, Evelyne Alecian, David Bohlender, Jean-Claude Bouret, Dave Hanes, Huib Henrichs, Nadine Manset, Coralie Neiner, Veronique Petit, Matt Shultz, and the MiMeS Collaboration

With only a handful of magnetic massive stars known, there is a troubling deficit in the scope of our knowledge of how magnetic fields influence stellar evolution, and almost no empirical basis for understanding how fields modify mass loss and rotation in massive stars. Most remarkably, there is still no solid consensus regarding the origin physics of these fields - whether they are fossil remnants, or produced by contemporaneous dynamos, or some combination of these mechanisms. This contribution will present an overview of the Survey Component of the MiMeS Large Programs, the primary goal of which is to search for Zeeman signatures in the circular polarimetry of massive stars (stars with spectral types B3 and hotter) that were previously unknown to host any magnetic field. To date, the MiMeS collaboration has collected more than 450 high-resolution spectropolarimetric observations with ESPaDOnS and Narval of about 130 individual OB stars, amongst which we have discovered or confirmed 13 new magnetic stars.