Paper detail

Statistical Time-Resolved Spectroscopy: A higher fraction of short-period binaries for metal-rich F-type dwarfs in SDSS

Stellar multiplicity lies at the heart of many problems in modern astrophysics, including the physics of star formation, the observational properties of unresolved stellar populations, and the rates of interacting binaries such as cataclysmic variables, X-ray binaries, and Type Ia supernovae. However, little is known about the stellar multiplicity of field stars in the Milky Way, in particular about the differences in the multiplicity characteristics between metal-rich disk stars and metal-poor halo stars. In this study we perform a statistical analysis of ~14,000 F-type dwarf stars in the Milky Way through time-resolved spectroscopy with the sub-exposures archived in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. We obtain absolute radial velocity measurements through template cross-correlation of individual sub-exposures with temporal baselines varying from minutes to years. These sparsely sampled radial velocity curves are analyzed using Markov chain Monte Carlo techniques to constrain the very short-period binary fraction for field F-type stars in the Milky Way. Metal-rich disk stars were found to be 30% more likely to have companions with periods shorter than 12 days than metal-poor halo stars.