Spectroscopic HR diagram of OB stars in the SMC

Using spectroscopically derived effective temperature Teff and surface gravities, we find that classical Be stars appear misplaced to low Teff and high luminosity in the spectroscopic Hertzsprung-Russell diagram (sHRD). Together with the most luminous stars in our sample, the stellar masses derived from the sHRD for these objects are systematically larger than those obtained from the conventional Hertzsprung-Russell diagram.

This suggests that the well-known, spectroscopic mass-discrepancy problem may be linked to the fact that both groups of stars have outer envelopes that are nearly gravitationally unbound. The non-emission-line stars in our sample mainly appear on the main sequence, allowing a first estimate of the terminal-age main sequence (TAMS) in the SMC, which matches the predicted TAMS between 12 and 40M_{sun}_ at SMC metallicity.