4.1.1. Large Magellanic Cloud

New B[e]SG candidates have been found either by dedicated searches, e.g., from cross-matching catalogs of emission-line stars with near-IR catalogs (e.g., [110]), or more serendipitously as a by-product of deep spectroscopic surveys of specific regions, such as the VLT-FLAMES Tarantula Survey (VFTS [111–113]) that was devoted to the 30 Doradus starburst region. In addition, surveys for other purposes, such as the search for post-asymptotic giant branch stars [114], resulted in new B[e]SG candidates9. Seven new B[e]SG objects have been proposed in total, of which only two fulfill the criteria for B[e]SGs, two are considered candidates, and three appear to be misclassified. All seven stars are listed in Table 4. Their locations in the two color–color diagrams are shown in Figure 6 in comparison with the confirmed B[e]SGs and LBVs from Table 3.

A sample of confirmed MC late-type stars and supergiants [115] is included in these color–color diagrams. These serve as reference for objects that might have a late-type companion. The outliers of the late-type stars, especially in the WISE diagram, are objects with high mass-loss.

A sample of Galactic Herbig AeBe (HAeBe) stars is also shown [116]. Only stars with known extinction values and solid magnitudes in all four bands were selected (rejecting objects with reported contamination). As some of these pre-main sequence objects suffer from very high extinction (*A*V > 5 mag), their colors were corrected using an *<sup>R</sup>*V-dependent extinction law [117] with *R*V = 5.0, which has been found to be reasonable for HAeBe stars [116]. These pre-main sequence stars were included to check for possible misclassification of objects that have a proposed luminosity ranging around the lower limit for B[e]SGs, because this luminosity range is shared by the most massive HAeBes. In the near-IR diagram, the HAeBes populate a stripe that appears to be parallel and seems to connect seamlessly to the region occupied by the classical B[e]SGs. In the WISE diagram, the HAeBes also seem to populate a stripe adjacent to the B[e]SG domain.

<sup>9</sup> I would like to point out that from the proposed 12 newly discovered B[e] stars only one was found to be a supergiant (see Table 4). The others have been carefully inspected in collaboration with Devika Kamath, and they did not fulfill the requirements. These results are ye<sup>t</sup> unpublished.

In the following, the reasons for classification of the new LMC objects as either confirmed or candidate, or for rejecting them as B[e]SGs are briefly presented.

**Table 4.** Confirmed and candidate B[e]SGs in the LMC. Misclassified objects are listed in the bottom part of the table.


Note: IR photometry for all objects is taken from the 2MASS point source catalog (J, H, and K [104]) and from the WISE All-Sky Data Release (W1, W2, and W4 [105]). a The JHK magnitudes listed in SIMBAD were mistakenly taken from the paper of Levato et al. [118], but these belong to the star LHA 120-S 165.
