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Published January 20, 2015 | Published + Submitted
Journal Article Open

A Survey of the High Order Multiplicity of Nearby Solar-type Binary Stars with Robo-AO

Abstract

We conducted a survey of nearby binary systems composed of main sequence stars of spectral types F and G in order to improve our understanding of the hierarchical nature of multiple star systems. Using Robo-AO, the first robotic adaptive optics instrument, we collected high angular resolution images with deep and well-defined detection limits in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey i' band. A total of 695 components belonging to 595 systems were observed. We prioritized observations of faint secondary components with separations over 10" to quantify the still poorly constrained frequency of their subsystems. Of the 214 secondaries observed, 39 contain such subsystems; 19 of those were discovered with Robo-AO. The selection-corrected frequency of secondary subsystems with periods from 10^(3.5) to 10^5 days is 0.12 ± 0.03, the same as the frequency of such companions to the primary. Half of the secondary pairs belong to quadruple systems where the primary is also a close pair, showing that the presence of subsystems in both components of the outer binary is correlated. The relatively large abundance of 2+2 quadruple systems is a new finding, and will require more exploration of the formation mechanism of multiple star systems. We also targeted close binaries with periods less than 100 yr, searching for their distant tertiary components, and discovered 17 certain and 2 potential new triples. In a subsample of 241 close binaries, 71 have additional outer companions. The overall frequency of tertiary components is not enhanced, compared to all (non-binary) targets, but in the range of outer periods from 106 to 107.5 days (separations on the order of 500 AU), the frequency of tertiary components is 0.16 ± 0.03, exceeding the frequency of similar systems among all targets (0.09) by almost a factor of two. Measurements of binary stars with Robo-AO allowed us to compute first orbits for 9 pairs and to improve orbits of another 11 pairs.

Additional Information

© 2015 American Astronomical Society. Received 2014 July 30; accepted 2014 November 1; published 2015 January 9. We acknowledge the input of the referee who read through this lengthy paper and gave us comments to improve it. The Robo-AO system is supported by collaborating partner institutions, the California Institute of Technology and the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics, and by the National Science Foundation under grant Nos. AST-0906060, AST-0960343, and AST-1207891, by the Mount Cuba Astronomical Foundation, and by a gift from Samuel Oschin. We are grateful to the Palomar Observatory staff for their ongoing support of Robo-AO on the P60, particularly S. Kunsman, M. Doyle, J. Henning, R. Walters, G. Van Idsinga, B. Baker, K. Dunscombe and D. Roderick. A portion of the research in this paper was carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. C.B. acknowledges support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. This work used the SIMBAD service operated by Centre des Données Stellaires (Strasbourg, France), bibliographic references from the Astrophysics Data System maintained by SAO/NASA, data products of the Two Micron All-Sky Survey (2MASS), the Washington Double Star Catalog maintained at USNO. Facility: PO:1.5m (Robo-AO)

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Submitted - 1411.0682v1.pdf

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August 22, 2023
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