Journal
ASTROPHYSICAL JOURNAL
Volume 744, Issue 2, Pages -Publisher
IOP PUBLISHING LTD
DOI: 10.1088/0004-637X/744/2/119
Keywords
binaries: spectroscopic; stars: low-mass
Categories
Funding
- National Science Foundation [AST-0901918]
- Princeton's astrophysics department
- Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
- U.S. Department of Energy
- National Aeronautics and Space Administration [NNX07AH68G, AST-0706938]
- Japanese Monbukagakusho
- Max Planck Society
- Higher Education Funding Council for England
- Division Of Astronomical Sciences
- Direct For Mathematical & Physical Scien [0901918] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
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We describe a search for close spectroscopic dwarf M star binaries using data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey to address the question of the rate of occurrence of multiplicity in M dwarfs. We use a template-fitting technique to measure radial velocities from 145,888 individual spectra obtained for a magnitude-limited sample of 39,543 M dwarfs. Typically, the three or four spectra observed for each star are separated in time by less than four hours, but for similar to 17% of the stars, the individual observations span more than two days. In these cases we are sensitive to large-amplitude radial velocity variations on timescales comparable to the separation between the observations. We use a control sample of objects having observations taken within a four-hour period to make an empirical estimate of the underlying radial velocity error distribution and simulate our detection efficiency for a wide range of binary star systems. We find the frequency of binaries among the dwarf M stars with a < 0.4 AU to be 3%-4%. Comparison with other samples of binary stars demonstrates that the close binary fraction, like the total binary fraction, is an increasing function of primary mass.
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