The M-dwarfs in Multiples (MinMs) survey – I. Stellar multiplicity among low-mass stars within 15 pc

By K. Ward-Duong, J. Patience, R. Rosa, J. Bulger, Abhijit Rajan, S. Goodwin, R. Parker, D. Mccarthy, C. Kulesa. 2015

278 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present a large-scale, volume-limited companion survey of 245 late-K to mid-M (K7-M6) dwarfs within 15 pc. Infrared adaptive optics (AO) data were analysed from the Very Large Telescope, Subaru Telescope, Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope, and MMT Observatory to detect close companions to the sample from $\sim$1 au to 100 au, while digitised wide-field archival plates were searched for wide companions from $\sim$100 au to 10,000 au. With sensitivity to the bottom of the main sequence over a separation range of 3 au to 10,000 au, multiple AO and wide-field epochs allow us to confirm candidates with common proper motions, minimize background contamination, and enable a measurement of comprehensive binary statistics. We detected 65 co-moving stellar companions and find a companion star fraction of $23.5 \pm 3.2$ per cent over the 3 au to 10,000 au separation range. The companion separation distribution is observed to rise to a higher frequency at smaller separations, peaking at closer separations than measured for more massive primaries. The mass ratio distribution across the $q = 0.2 - 1.0$ range is flat, similar to that of multiple systems with solar-type primaries. The characterisation of binary and multiple star frequency for low-mass field stars can provide crucial comparisons with star forming environments and hold implications for the frequency and evolutionary histories of their associated disks and planets.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1031a6780188afb19ec5907265e51fc57cc303ed

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Citations in the corpus

The Habitability of Planets Orbiting M-dwarf Stars (2016, background): “And the fraction of lowmass stars with stellar companions (∼23.5%, Ward-Duong et al., 2015) is lower than solar-type stars (>40%, Raghavan et al., 2010), which may reduce the likelihood of protoplanetary disk truncation in M-dwarf systems (Artymowicz & Lubow, 1994).”
The Solar Neighborhood. XLV. The Stellar Multiplicity Rate of M Dwarfs Within 25 pc (2019, methodology): “…observations with ELODIE and SOPHIE over a range of resolutions (R = 40,000 - 75,000) make no mention of this object being multiple (Houdebine 2010), nor was a companion detected with lucky imaging (Jódar et al. 2013) or with infrared adaptive optics observations (Ward-Duong et al. 2015).”