Non-thermal Mg I emission at 12 um from Procyon

Abstract

We report on stellar Mg I emission at 12 um from alpha CMi (Procyon), a star slightly hotter than the Sun. Solar Mg I emission is well-known and its formation was successfully explained in detail by Carlsson et al. (1992). Here, for the first time, we compare synthetic spectra of the emission lines at 12 um with observations of a star other than the Sun. The use of these lines as stellar diagnostics has been anticipated for 10 years or more. We find that the model reproduces the observed emission in Procyon quite well. We expect that high-resolution spectrographs on 8-10 m telescopes will finally be able to exploit these new diagnostics.