Radio Astrometry Of The Close Active Binary HR5110

TL;DR

This study used VLBI radio observations over 26 days to precisely locate the emission source in the HR 5110 binary, confirming it originates from the KIV secondary star with detailed magnetic and electron density estimates.

Contribution

First VLBI astrometric measurements of HR 5110 over multiple epochs, pinpointing the emission source and modeling its magnetic and electron properties.

Findings

Emission source located on the KIV secondary star

Magnetic field strength around 10 G

Relativistic electron density about 10^5 cm^-3

Abstract

The close active binary HR 5110 was observed at six epochs over 26 days using a global VLBI array at 15.4~GHz. We used phase-referencing to determine the position of the radio centroid at each epoch with an uncertainty significantly smaller than the component separation. After correcting for proper motion and parallax, we find that the centroid locations of all six epochs have barycenter separations consistent with an emission source located on the KIV secondary, and not in an interaction region between the stars or on the F primary. We used a homogeneous power-law gyrosynchrotron emission model to reproduce the observed flux densities and fractional circular polarization. The resulting ranges of mean magnetic field strength and relativistic electron densities are of order 10 G and $10^5$ cm$^{-3}$ respectively in the source region.