LOW-MASS TERTIARY COMPANIONS TO SPECTROSCOPIC BINARIES. I. COMMON PROPER MOTION SURVEY FOR WIDE COMPANIONS USING 2MASS

By P. R. Allen, A. Burgasser, Jacqueline K. Faherty, J. D. Kirkpatrick. 2009

222 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We report the first results of a multi-epoch search for wide (separations greater than a few tens of AU), low-mass tertiary companions of a volume-limited sample of 118 known spectroscopic binaries within 30 pc of the Sun, using the Two Micron All Sky Survey Point Source Catalog and follow-up observations with the KPNO and CTIO 4 m telescopes. Note that this sample is not volume complete but volume limited, and, thus, there is incompleteness in our reported companion rates. We are sensitive to common proper motion companions with separations from roughly 200 AU to 10,000 AU (∼10″ →  ∼ 10′). From 77 sources followed-up to date, we recover 11 previously known tertiaries, 3 previously known candidate tertiaries, of which 2 are spectroscopically confirmed and 1 rejected, and 3 new candidates, of which 2 are confirmed and 1 rejected. This yields an estimated wide tertiary fraction of 19.5+5.2−3.7%. This observed fraction is consistent with predictions set out in star formation simulations where the fraction of wide, low-mass companions to spectroscopic binaries is >10%.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/14201a39031b67a0a29d5702b3b8c7a0ee817087

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. J. D. Kirkpatrick
2. K. Luhman
3. A. Burgasser
4. Michael C. Liu
5. M. Cushing
6. C. Gelino
7. I. McLean
8. M. Skrutskie

In Instrumentation

1. J. D. Kirkpatrick
2. A. Burgasser
3. M. Cushing
4. C. Gelino
5. Michael C. Liu
6. I. McLean
7. K. Luhman
8. M. Skrutskie

Citations in the corpus

• Stellar Multiplicity (2013, background): “More than half of all pairs with logP ≤ 2 are members of high-order multiple systems and this proportion rises even further for the shortest-period systems (Allen et al. 2012, Stellar Multiplicity 5 Tokovinin et al. 2006).”
• A T8.5 BROWN DWARF MEMBER OF THE ξ URSAE MAJORIS SYSTEM (2012, result): “This system is similar to, but somewhat more complex than, the binaries studied by Allen et al. (2012), who found that 1 in 5 spectroscopic binary systems had distant common proper motion companions.”