Bringing VY Canis Majoris Down to Size: An Improved Determination of Its Effective Tempeature

The star VY CMa is a late-type M supergiant with many peculiarities, mostly related to the intense circumstellar environment due to the star's high mass-loss rate. Claims have been made that would suggest this star is considerably more luminous (L = 5 x 10^5 Lo) and larger (R=2800 Ro) than other Galactic red supergiants (RSGs). Indeed, such a location in the H-R diagram would be well in the "Hayashi forbidden zone" where stars cannot be in hydrostatic equilibrium. These extraordinary properties, however, rest upon an assumed effective temperature of 2800-3000 K, far cooler than recent work have shown RSGs to be. To obtain a better estimate, we fit newly obtained spectrophotometry in the optical and NIR with the same MARCS models used for our recent determination of the physical properties of other RSGs; we also use $V-K$ and $V-J$ from the literature to derive an effective temperatures. We find that the star likely has a temperature of 3650 K, a luminosity L = 6 x 10^4 Lo, and a radius of 600Ro. These values are consistent with VY CMa being an ordinary evolved 15 Mo RSG, and agree well with the Geneva evolutionary tracks. We find that the circumstellar dust region has a temperature of 760 K, and an effective radius of approximately 130 AU, if spherical geometry is assumed for the latter. What causes this star to have such a high mass-loss, and large variations in brightness (but with little change in color), remains a mystery at present, although we speculate that perhaps this star (and NML Cyg) are simply normal RSGs caught during an unusually unstable time.