ELEVEN NEW HEAVILY REDDENED FIELD WOLF–RAYET STARS

We report the results of a medium-narrowband 2 μm line survey covering 5.8 deg2 near the Galactic plane. We confirm 11 new field Wolf-Rayet stars along three lines of sight probing the inner Galaxy, demonstrating the capability to uncover distant and highly reddened populations of Galactic wind-borne emission-line stars suffering extinction as high as AV ∼ 40 and as distant as 9 kpc down to modest magnitude limits of Ks ∼ 12.5. All stars are of subtype WC7-8, with median distance d = 6 kpc and median extinction AKs = 2.5. Over the fields surveyed, the density of Wolf-Rayet stars to limiting magnitude Ks ∼ 12.5 was found to be 1.9 deg–2. We compare this to models which predict their distribution within the Galaxy and find that, even neglecting survey and subtype incompleteness, they consistently underpredict the number of newly discovered stars along the surveyed lines of sight.