White Dwarf-Red Dwarf Systems Resolved with the Hubble Space Telescope. I. First Results

Creators: Farihi, J.; Hoard, D. W.; Wachter, S.

Abstract

First results are presented for a Hubble Space Telescope (HST) Advanced Camera for Surveys snapshot study of white dwarfs with likely red dwarf companions. Of 48 targets observed and analyzed so far, 27 are totally or partially resolved into two or more components, while an additional 15 systems are almost certainly unresolved binaries. These results provide the first direct empirical evidence for a bimodal distribution of orbital separations among binary systems containing at least one white dwarf.

Additional Information

© 2006 American Astronomical Society. Received 2006 February 2; accepted 2006 March 27. J. F. would like to thank the following people for their much appreciated software and computing support directly related to this work: R. Hook, C. Hanley, D. Starr, K. Labrie, and K. Chiboucas. Sincere thanks goes to the anonymous referee for many helpful comments, which improved the quality of the manuscript. This work is based on observations made with the Hubble Space Telescope, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., under NASA contract NAS5-26555. Support for program number 10255 was provided by NASA through grant HST-GO-10255 from the Space Telescope Science Institute. Some data used in this paper are part of the Two Micron All Sky Survey, a joint project of the University of Massachusetts and the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC), Caltech, funded by NASA and the National Science Foundation. 2MASS data were retrieved from the NASA/ IPAC Infrared Science Archive, which is operated by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Caltech, under contract with NASA. This research has made use of NASA's Astrophysics Data System Bibliographic Services, and the SIMBAD database, operated at CDS, Strasbourg, France.

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