English

A Renaissance study of Am stars. I. The mass ratio distribution

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics 2015-05-19 v1 Solar and Stellar Astrophysics

Abstract

Triggered by the study of Carquillat & Prieur (2007, MNRAS, 380, 1064) of Am binaries, I reanalyse their sample of 60 orbits to derive the mass ratio distribution (MRD), assuming as they did a priori functional forms, i.e. a power law or a Gaussian. The sample is then extended using orbits published by several groups and a full analysis of the MRD is made, without any assumption on the functional form. I derive the MRD using a Richardson-Lucy inversion method, assuming a fixed mass of the Am primary and randomly distributed orbital inclinations. Using the large sub-sample of double-lined spectroscopic binaries, I show that this methodology is indeed perfectly adequate. Using the inversion method, applied to my extended sample of 162 systems, I find that the final MRD can be approximated by a uniform distribution.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1008.3817,
  title  = {A Renaissance study of Am stars. I. The mass ratio distribution},
  author = {Henri M. J. Boffin},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1008.3817},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

7 pages, 9 figures; Accepted by A&A