Continuation of Mass Ratio Determination for Doubles with Substellar Mass Members

Details Continuation of Mass Ratio Determination for Doubles with Substellar Mass Members Continuation of Mass Ratio Determination for Doubles with Substellar Mass Members

Jul 1996

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1996hst..prop.6641t&link_type=abstract

HST Proposal ID #6641

Computer Science

Hst Proposal Id #6641 Cool Stars

Scientific paper

Stellar masses which lie at or just below the stellar/sub- stellar boundary are difficult to determine with certainty. Only binary stars with low luminosity members provide these low masses. In the best studied cases a significant source of uncertainty in the estimated masses is the blending of the light on the photographic plates used to record the stars' positions. The blending must be modeled in order to determine the locus of the center of mass. The position of the center of mass determines the mass ratio. Without knowing this, or the fraction of the total mass of the pair present in each component of the system, the uncertainty resulting from blending provides a point of attack for those who question the reality of mass measurements as low as 0.06 Msun , and thus not clearly sub-stellar or ``brown dwarfs''. We have observed the separation of L722-22 in Cycle 3 and 4 of this proposal with sub-milliarcsecond internal precision, far below the error level of ground-based infrared speckle measurements. In a few years the relative orbit could be determined with milliarcsecond-level precision and the center of mass will be located for determination of the individual mass of each component. This is the third year of our original proposal.

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