A purely geometric distance to the binary star Atlas, a member of the Pleiades

By N. Zwahlen, P. North, Y. Debernardi, Laurent Eyer, F. Galland, M. Groenewegen, C. H. L. D. D. l'EPFL, Obs. Geneve, Observatoire de Grenoble, Leuven and 1 more. 2004

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We present radial velocity and new interferometric measurements of the double star Atlas, which permit, with the addition of published interferometric data, to precisely derive the orbital parameters of the binary system and the masses of the components. The derived semi-major axis, compared with its measured angular size, allows to determine a distance to Atlas of 132 ± 4 pc in a purely geometrical way. Under the assumption that the location of Atlas is representative of the average distance of the cluster, we confirm the distance value generally obtained through main sequence fitting, in contradiction with the early Hipparcos result (118.3 ± 3. 5p c).

Subfields: Archeology, History

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0532e5bc7b88342dc60434c37e2d4a9127b453b7

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Citations in the corpus

• ECLIPSING BINARY STARS AS BENCHMARKS FOR TRIGONOMETRIC PARALLAXES IN THE GAIA ERA (2016, unknown): “…parallax placed at 120.2±1.9 pc (van Leeuwen 2009) as compared to the broadly accepted distance of »135 pc from a variety of methods (e.g., Munari et al. 2004; Zwahlen et al. 2004; Soderblom et al. 2005; Groenewegen et al. 2007; Melis et al. 2014; Mädler et al. 2016, and others cited therein).”
• THE PALOMAR/KECK ADAPTIVE OPTICS SURVEY OF YOUNG SOLAR ANALOGS: EVIDENCE FOR A UNIVERSAL COMPANION MASS FUNCTION (2008, background): “…members were: 133±6 pc for stars in the Pleiades (a weighted mean of the distances to seven members presented in Pan et al. 2004, Munari et al. 2004, Zwahlen et al. 2004, Southworth et al. 2005, and assuming ∼ 1◦ cluster angu- lar extent from Adams et al. 2001), and 190 ± 11 pc for stars in α…”
• Parallaxes and proper motions for 20 open clusters as based on the new Hipparcos catalogue (2009, methodology): “…to absolute values have been seriously underestimated; 3. one binary system with radial velocity measurements and an astrometric orbit by Zwahlen et al. (2004); 4. the Hipparcos-data based parallax, derived from the measurements of 53 cluster members spread over some 50 square degrees…”
• EXTRACTING RADIAL VELOCITIES OF A- AND B-TYPE STARS FROM ECHELLE SPECTROGRAPH CALIBRATION SPECTRA (2015, methodology): “We observe one blended double-lined binary, HR1178 (Abt et al. 1965; Zwahlen et al. 2004), which we exclude from our sample because our modeling technique does not account for multiple lines in the spectra.”