Wide Binaries in Tycho-Gaia II: Metallicities, Abundances, and Prospects for Chemical Tagging

TL;DR

This study confirms that wide binary stars share similar metallicities and elemental abundances, validating their common origin and potential as tools for chemical tagging and understanding stellar evolution.

Contribution

It provides empirical evidence that wide binaries are co-chemical and co-eval, supporting their use in chemical tagging and stellar evolution studies, based on Gaia, RAVE, and LAMOST data.

Findings

Wide binary components have consistent metallicities and abundances within observational uncertainties.

Wide binaries are confirmed as co-chemical and co-eval, acting as mini-open clusters.

Unrelated pairs with large separations often show inconsistent properties, indicating random alignments.

Abstract

From our recent catalog based on the first Gaia data release (TGAS), we select wide binaries in which both stars have been observed by the Radial Velocity Experiment (RAVE) or the Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fibre Spectroscopic Telescope (LAMOST). Using RAVE and LAMOST metallicities and RAVE Mg, Al, Si, Ti, and Fe abundances, we find that the differences in the metallicities and elemental abundances of components of wide binaries are consistent with being due to observational uncertainties, in agreement with previous results for smaller and more restricted samples. The metallicity and elemental abundance consistency between wide binary components presented in this work confirms their common origin and bolsters the status of wide binaries as "mini-open clusters." Furthermore, this is evidence that wide binaries are effectively co-eval and co-chemical, supporting their use for e.g., constraining age-activity-rotation relations, the initial-final mass relation for white dwarfs, and M-dwarf metallicity indicators. Additionally, we demonstrate that the common proper motion, common parallax pairs in TGAS with the most extreme separations (s $\gtrsim$ 0.1 pc) typically have inconsistent metallicities, radial velocities or both and are therefore likely to be predominantly comprised of random alignments of unassociated stars with similar astrometry, in agreement with our previous results. Finally, we propose that wide binaries form an ideal data set with which to test chemical tagging as a method to identify stars of common origin, particularly because the stars in wide binaries span a wide range of metallicities, much wider than that spanned by nearby open clusters.