High-precision radial-velocity techniques, which enabled the detection of extrasolar planets are now sensitive to relativistic effects in the data of spectroscopic binary stars (SBs). We show how these effects can be used to derive the absolute masses of the components of eclipsing single-lined SBs and double-lined SBs from Doppler measurements alone. High-precision stellar spectroscopy can thus substantially increase the number of measured stellar masses, thereby improving the mass-radius and mass-luminosity calibrations.
@article{arxiv.astro-ph/0609753,
title = {Spectroscopic Binary Mass Determination using Relativity},
author = {Shay Zucker and Tal Alexander},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:astro-ph/0609753},
year = {2009}
}
Comments
10 pages, 1 figure, accepted for publication by the Astrophysical Journal Letters