Differential Emission Measure Determination of Collisionally Ionized Plasma: II. Application to Hot Stars

In a previous paper we have described a technique to derive constraints on the differential emission measure (DEM) distribution, a measure of the temperature distribution, of collisionally ionized hot plasmas from their X-ray emission line spectra. We apply this technique to the Chandra/HETG spectra of all of the nine hot stars available to us at the time this project was initiated. We find that DEM distributions of six of the seven O stars in our sample are very similar but that theta Ori has an X-ray spectrum characterized by higher temperatures. The DEM distributions of both of B stars in our sample have lower magnitudes than those of the O stars and one, tau Sco, is characterized by higher temperatures than the other, beta Cru. These results confirm previous work in which high temperatures have been found for theta Ori and tau Sco and taken as evidence for channeling of the wind in magnetic fields, the existence of which are related to the stars' youth. Our results demonstrate the utility of our method for deriving temperature information for large samples of X-ray emission line spectra.