Candidate Wide-separation Companions to Nearby, Dusty Young Stars: Gaia Weighs In

TL;DR

This study uses Gaia DR2 data to verify whether proposed wide-separation companions to five nearby young stars are truly at the same distance and moving together, confirming three as genuine wide binaries and disproving two.

Contribution

The paper demonstrates the effectiveness of Gaia DR2 data in confirming or refuting wide-separation binary companions to young stars, providing a method for future studies.

Findings

Confirmed three wide binaries with separations of 44.3, 13.3, and 12.3 kau.

Disproved two proposed wide binaries based on Gaia data.

Highlighted the need for future research on the bound status and disk presence in confirmed pairs.

Abstract

We exploit the precise parallaxes and proper motions contained in Gaia Data Release 2 (DR2) to establish whether the proposed wide-separation companions to five nearby, young stars are in fact equidistant and comoving with these stars. For three of the proposed wide pairs --- TW Hya + 2M1102-34; HR 4796A + 2M1235-39; and V4046 Sgr AB + GSC 07396 --- the Gaia DR2 data confirm that the two stars lie at the same distance and are comoving (or nearly so), to within the measurement errors. We conclude that these three pairs indeed constitute wide-separation binaries with projected separations of 44.3 kau, 13.3 kau, and 12.3 kau, respectively. In contrast, the DR2 data disprove the hypothesis that T Cha + 2M1155-79 and HD 113766AB + TYC 8246-2900-1 constitute wide binaries. Future investigations of the three wide young-star pairs confirmed in this work should be aimed at establishing whether they remain bound at the present epoch and whether the presence of long-lived disks orbiting the primaries is linked to the orbital or dissolution timescales of these wide binaries.