¹ Royal Observatory of Belgium, 3 avenue circulaire, 1180 Brussels, Belgium
² GEPI, Observatoire de Paris, CNRS, Université Paris Diderot; 5 place Jules Janssen 92195 Meudon Cedex, France
³ European Organisation for Astronomical Research in the Southern Hemisphere, Karl-Schwarzschild-Str. 2, D-85748 Garching b. Muenchen, Germany
⁴ Observatorio Astronómico de Valencia, edifici Instituts d'investigació, Poligon la Coma, 46980 Paterna Valencia, Spain

An important question about Be stars is whether Be stars are born as Be stars or whether they become Be stars during their evolution. It is necessary to observe young clusters to answer this question. To this end, observations of stars in NGC 6611 and the star-formation region of Eagle Nebula have been carried out with the ESO-WFI in slitless spectroscopic mode and at the VLT-GIRAFFE (R  6400–17000). The targets for the GIRAFFE observations were pre-selected from the literature and our catalogue of emission-line stars based on the WFI study. GIRAFFE observations allowed us to study accurately the population of the early-type stars with and without emission lines. For this study, we determined the fundamental parameters of OBA stars thanks to the GIRFIT code. We also studied the status of the objects (main sequence or pre-main sequence stars) by using IR data, membership probabilities, and location in HR diagrams. The nature of the early-type stars with emission-line stars in NGC 6611 and its surrounding environment is derived. The slitless observations with the WFI clearly indicate a small number of emission-line stars in M 16. We observed with GIRAFFE 101 OBA stars, among them 9 are emission-line stars with circumstellar emission in Hα. We found that: W080 could be a new He-strong star, like W601. W301 is a possible classical Be star, W503 is a mass-transfer eclipsing binary with an accretion disk, and the other ones are possible Herbig Ae/Be stars. We also found that the rotational velocities of main sequence B stars are 18% lower than those of pre-main sequence B stars, in good agreement with theory about the evolution of rotational velocities. Combining adaptive optics, IR data, spectroscopy, and radial velocity indications, we found that 27% of the B-type stars are binaries. We also redetermined the age of NGC 6611 found equal to 1.2–1.8 Myr in good agreement with the most recent determinations.

Accepted by A&A
Preprints from martayan@oma.be
or on the web at http://arxiv.org/abs/0806.1430