Ti and Fe lines in red supergiants

With their enormous brightness at J band RSG stars are ideal probes of cosmic abundances. Recent LTE studies have found that metallicities accurate to 0.15 dex can be determined from medium-resolution spectroscopy of individual RSGs in galaxies as distant as 10 Mpc.

The NLTE results obtained in this investigation support these findings. NLTE abundance corrections for iron are smaller than 0.05 dex for effective temperatures between 3400 K and 4200 K and 0.1 dex at 4400 K. For titanium the NLTE abundance corrections vary smoothly between -0.4 dex and +0.2 dex as a function of effective temperature. For both elements, the corrections also depend on stellar gravity and metallicity.