The specific characteristic of the SED of serendipitously discovered post-AGB binaries, allowed us to launch a very extensive multi-wavelength study of evolved objects, selected on the basis of very specific selection criteria. Those criteria were tuned to discover more stars with circumstellar dusty discs. The observational study includes radial velocity monitoring, high spectral resolution optical studies, infrared spectral dust studies, sub-mm bolometric observations and high spatial resolution interferometric experiments with the VLTI. In this contribution, we will review the preliminary results of this program showing that the binary rate is indeed very high. We argue that the formation of a stable circumbinary disc must play a lead role in the evolution of the systems.
@article{arxiv.astro-ph/0702245,
title = {Post-AGB Binaries},
author = {Hans Van Winckel},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:astro-ph/0702245},
year = {2007}
}
Comments
8 pages, 3 figures, to appear in the proceedings of the conference "Evolution and chemistry of symbiotic stars, binary post-AGB and related objects", held in Wierzba, Poland, 28-30 August 2006 (Baltic Astronomy)