THE VLA NASCENT DISK AND MULTIPLICITY SURVEY OF PERSEUS PROTOSTARS (VANDAM). II. MULTIPLICITY OF PROTOSTARS IN THE PERSEUS MOLECULAR CLOUD

By J. Tobin, L. Looney, Zhi-Yun Li, C. Chandler, M. Dunham, D. Segura-Cox, S. Sadavoy, C. Melis, R. Harris, K. Kratter and 1 more. 2016

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We present a multiplicity study of all known protostars (94) in the Perseus molecular cloud from a Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array survey at Ka-band (8 mm and 1 cm) and C-band (4 and 6.6 cm). The observed sample has a bolometric luminosity range between 0.1 L⊙ and ∼33 L⊙, with a median of 0.7 L⊙. This multiplicity study is based on the Ka-band data, having a best resolution of ∼0.″065 (15 au) and separations out to ∼43″ (10,000 au) can be probed. The overall multiplicity fraction (MF) is found to be 0.40 ± 0.06 and the companion star fraction (CSF) is 0.71 ± 0.06. The MF and CSF of the Class 0 protostars are 0.57 ± 0.09 and 1.2 ± 0.2, and the MF and CSF of Class I protostars are both 0.23 ± 0.08. The distribution of companion separations appears bi-modal, with a peak at ∼75 au and another peak at ∼3000 au. Turbulent fragmentation is likely the dominant mechanism on >1000 au scales and disk fragmentation is likely to be the dominant mechanism on <200 au scales. Toward three Class 0 sources we find companions separated by <30 au. These systems have the smallest separations of currently known Class 0 protostellar binary systems. Moreover, these close systems are embedded within larger (50–400 au) structures and may be candidates for ongoing disk fragmentation.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Atmospheric Science, Spectroscopy

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/59ad1dc9c2a70cc87cc175941a781379f9c6b17f

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Citations in the corpus

Mind Your Ps and Qs: The Interrelation between Period (P) and Mass-ratio (Q) Distributions of Binary Stars (2016, background): “Indeed, Ghez et al. (1993), Duchêne et al. (2007), Connelley et al. (2008b), and Tobin et al. (2016) all measure the frequency of wide companions to solar-type pre-MS stars to be ≈ 2 - 3 times higher than that measured for the field population.”
The Close Binary Fraction of Solar-type Stars Is Strongly Anticorrelated with Metallicity (2018, background): “There is now compelling observational evidence that disk fragmentation may occur for low-mass stars near solar metallicity (Tobin et al. 2016a), which boosts our confidence in this interpretation.”