Southern Massive Stars at High Angular Resolution: Observational Campaign and Companion Detection

TL;DR

This study conducted a systematic high-angular-resolution interferometric survey of 117 and 162 Galactic O-type stars, discovering nearly 200 new companions, revealing that massive stars almost always form in multiple systems.

Contribution

First systematic interferometric survey of Galactic massive stars, providing new companion detections and detailed multiplicity statistics at small separations.

Findings

Almost 200 new companions discovered.

Multiplicity fraction within 8'' is approximately 91%.

Massive stars predominantly form in multiple systems.

Abstract

Multiplicity is one of the most fundamental observable properties of massive O-type stars and offers a promising way to discriminate between massive star formation theories. Nevertheless, companions at separations between 1 and 100 mas remain mostly unknown due to intrinsic observational limitations. [...] The Southern MAssive Stars at High angular resolution survey (SMASH+) was designed to fill this gap by providing the first systematic interferometric survey of Galactic massive stars. We observed 117 O-type stars with VLTI/PIONIER and 162 O-type stars with NACO/SAM, respectively probing the separation ranges 1-45 and 30-250mas and brightness contrasts of Delta H < 4 and Delta H < 5. Taking advantage of NACO's field-of-view, we further uniformly searched for visual companions in an 8''-radius down to Delta H = 8. This paper describes the observations and data analysis, reports the discovery of almost 200 new companions in the separation range from 1mas to 8'' and presents the catalog of detections, including the first resolved measurements of over a dozen known long-period spectroscopic binaries. Excluding known runaway stars for which no companions are detected, 96 objects in our main sample (DEC < 0 deg; H<7.5) were observed both with PIONIER and NACO/SAM. The fraction of these stars with at least one resolved companion within 200mas is 0.53. Accounting for known but unresolved spectroscopic or eclipsing companions, the multiplicity fraction at separation < 8'' increases to f_m = 0.91 +/- 0.03. The fraction of luminosity class V stars that have a bound companion reaches 100% at 30mas while their average number of physically connected companions within 8'' is f_c = 2.2 +/- 0.3. This demonstrates that massive stars form nearly exclusively in multiple systems. Additionally, the nine non-thermal (NT) radio emitters observed by SMASH+ are all resolved [...]