Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astrophysics
Scientific paper
Nov 1990
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1990ap%26ss.173..315h&link_type=abstract
Astrophysics and Space Science (ISSN 0004-640X), vol. 173, no. 2, Nov. 1990, p. 315-342. Research supported by the Nationaal Ins
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astrophysics
15
Binary Stars, Mass Ratios, Stellar Mass, Stellar Orbits, Stellar Spectra, Mass Distribution, Stellar Evolution, Stellar Luminosity
Scientific paper
The present effort to arrive a realistic statistical distribution of the mass-ratio q = M(secondary)/M(primary) investigates the selection effects governing the observations of visual binary stars on the basis of a numerical simulation code which 'generates' binary stars and 'looks' at them to establish whether a terrestrial observer would be capable of detecting them. It is found that the mass-ratio distribution observed for main-sequence systems can be accounted for by a distribution of secondary masses according to the initial mass function (IMF), where phi(M) is proportional to M to the -2.7th power. Numerical simulations of biased sampling show that the q-distribution derived from the Orbits of Visual Binaries catalog is incompatible with the distribution of secondary masses according to the IMF.
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