English

Visual orbit for the low-mass binary Gliese 22 AC from speckle interferometry

Astrophysics 2009-11-07 v1

Abstract

Based on 14 data points obtained with near-infrared speckle interferometry and covering an almost entire revolution, we present a first visual orbit for the low-mass binary system Gliese 22 AC. The quality of the orbit is largely improved with respect to previous astrometric solutions. The dynamical system mass is 0.592 +- 0.065 solar masses, where the largest part of the error is due to the Hipparcos parallax. A comparison of this dynamical mass with mass-luminosity relations on the lower main sequence and theoretical evolutionary models for low-mass objects shows that both probably underestimate the masses of M dwarfs. A mass estimate for the companion Gliese 22 C indicates that this object is a very low-mass star with a mass close to the hydrogen burning mass limit.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.astro-ph/0305330,
  title  = {Visual orbit for the low-mass binary Gliese 22 AC from speckle interferometry},
  author = {J. Woitas and V. S. Tamazian and J. A. Docobo and Ch. Leinert},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:astro-ph/0305330},
  year   = {2009}
}

Comments

Accepted by Astronomy and Astrophysics, 6 pages, 2 figures