Toward Detecting Fast Moving Massive Stars around the 30 Doradus Region

We have started an HST proper motion survey in the 30 Dor region of the Large Magellanic Cloud with the goal to find directions of tangential velocities of massive runaway stars and, hence, test the suggested production mechanisms (point of origin) of such stars. While the thrust of this survey is based on yet-to-be-completed two-epoch observations with the HST wide field cameras, there appears to be a considerable potential in achieving complementary aims by combining archival data from the HST WFPC2 with the latest extant observations. We report the first results of this approach and explore the level of proper-motion precision achievable with these data sets in the regime of sub-optimal images for the brighter main target stars.

SdM acknowledges the NASA Hubble Fellowship grant HST-HF-51270.01-A awarded by STScI, operated by AURA for NASA, contract NAS 5-26555.