Stability boundaries for massive stars in the sHR diagram

Stability boundaries of radial pulsations in massive stars are compared with positions of variable and non-variable blue-supergiants in the spectroscopic HR (sHR) diagram (Langer & Kudritzki 2014), whose vertical axis is 4 log T _eff - log g(= log L/M). Observational data indicate that variables tend to have higher L/M than non-variables in agreement with the theoretical prediction. However, many variable blue-supergiants are found to have values of L/M below the theoretical stability boundary; i.e., surface gravities seem to be too high by around 0.2-0.3 dex.