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Resolving the environments of massive stars is crucial for understandingtheir formation mechanisms and their impact on galaxy evolution. An importantopen question is whether massive stars found in diffuse regions outside spiralarms formed in-situ or migrated there after forming in denser environments. Toaddress this question, we use multi-resolution measurements of extinction inthe Andromeda Galaxy (M31) to probe the ISM surrounding massive stars acrossgalactic environments.  We construct a catalog of 42,107 main-sequence massive star candidates ($M\geq 8 M_{\odot}$) using resolved stellar photometry from the PanchromaticHubble Andromeda Treasury (PHAT) program, plus stellar and dust model fits fromthe Bayesian Extinction and Stellar Tool (BEAST). We quantify galacticenvironments by computing surrounding stellar densities of massive stars usingKernel Density Estimation. We then compare high-resolution line-of-sightextinction estimates from the BEAST with 25-pc resolution dust maps from PHAT,measuring the total column density distribution of extinction.  Our key finding is that, although the average total column density of dustincreases with the density of massive stars, the average line-of-sightextinction towards massive stars remains constant across all environments. Thissuggests that massive stars have a uniform amount of dust in their immediateenvironment, regardless of their location in the galaxy. One possibleexplanation for these findings is that small molecular clouds are still capableof forming massive stars, even if they are not resolvable at 25-pc. Theseresults indicate that massive stars are forming in the sparse regions of M31,as opposed to migrating there.

Dust around massive stars is agnostic to galactic environment: New insights from PHAT/BEAST