Low-mass Binary Stars And The Mass-luminosity Relation: Past, Present, And Future

Details Low-mass Binary Stars And The Mass-luminosity Relation: Past, Present, And Future Low-mass Binary Stars And The Mass-luminosity Relation: Past, Present, And Future

Jun 2006

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2006dda....37.1203b&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, DDA meeting #37, #12.03; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 38, p.673

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

Scientific paper

The Mass-Luminosity Relation (MLR) is the second most important ``map" of stellar astronomy, the H-R diagram being the first. The mass of a star is the key parameter that dictates its entire evolution. For single objects, the MLR allows astronomers to convert a relatively easily observed quantity, luminosity, to a more revealing characteristic, mass, yielding a better understanding of the object's nature. Additionally, determining precise masses for extrasolar planets requires knowing precise masses for their parent stars.
For the past ten years a group of us, led by Todd Henry, have carried out an investigation of the lower main-sequence MLR. Originally motivated by the immense scatter in that potentially very useful tool, we have obtained both fringe tracking and fringe-scanning observations of low-mass binary stars with the Hubble Space Telescope interferometric Fine Guidance Sensors. This project is one of, if not the longest ongoing General Observer project in the history of HST. In addition to FGS measures, we have carried out a radial velocity campaign on a number of these binary stars, using the Sandiford Echelle Spectrograph at the Struve 2.1m telescope at McDonald Observatory. The constraint that astrometry and radial velocities describe the same physical system improves the accuracy of our masses. This effort has resulted in a preliminary Mass-Luminosity relation made up of stars with mass errors typically 4%.
Ultimately we seek masses with 1% error. These will come from astrometry obtained with the Space Interferometry Mission (SIM). Such precision will improve comparisons with real stars, allowing choices to be made between various modeling approaches and the inclusion and modeling of stellar phenomena such as convection, mass loss, turbulent mixing, rotation, and magnetic activity. This work is supported by NASA grant STScI GO-10613 and SIM/JPL /GSU BLF57-02.

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