The Binarity of Early-type Stars from LAMOST Medium-resolution Spectroscopic Survey

TL;DR

This study identifies and analyzes the binary fraction of early-type stars using LAMOST medium-resolution spectra, revealing a decreasing trend in binary fractions from early to late spectral types and estimating intrinsic multiplicity properties.

Contribution

The paper introduces a method to identify massive binaries from LAMOST spectra and corrects for observational biases to estimate intrinsic binary fractions across spectral groups.

Findings

Observed binary fractions decrease from 24.6% to 7.4% across groups.

Intrinsic binary fractions are estimated between 44% and 68%.

No correlation found between spectral type and orbital period distribution.

Abstract

Massive binaries play significant roles in many fields. Identification of massive stars, particularly massive binaries, is of great importance. In this paper, by adopting the technique of measuring the equivalent widths of several spectral lines, we identified 9,382 early-type stars from LAMOST medium-resolution survey and divided the sample into four groups, T1 ($\sim$O-B4), T2 ($\sim$B5), T3 ($\sim$B7), and T4 ($\sim$B8-A). The relative radial velocities $RV_{\rm rel}$ were calculated using the Maximum Likelihood Estimation. The stars with significant changes of $RV_{\rm rel}$ and at least larger than 15.57km s$^{-1}$ were identified as spectroscopic binaries. We found that the observed spectroscopic binary fractions for the four groups are $24.6\%\pm0.5\%$, $20.8\%\pm0.6\%$, $13.7\%\pm0.3\%$, and $7.4\%\pm0.3\%$, respectively. Assuming that orbital period ($P$) and mass ratio ($q$) have intrinsic distributions as $f(P) \propto P^\pi$ (1\textless$P$\textless1000 days) and $f(q) \propto q^\kappa$ (0.1\textless$q$\textless1), respectively, we conducted a series of Monte-Carlo simulations to correct observational biases for estimating the intrinsic multiplicity properties. The results show that the intrinsic binary fractions for the four groups are 68$\%\pm8\%$, 52$\%\pm3\%$, 44$\%\pm6\%$, and 44$\%\pm6\%$, respectively. The best estimated values for $\pi$ are -1$\pm0.1$, -1.1$\pm0.05$, -1.1$\pm0.1$, and -0.6$\pm0.05$, respectively. The $\kappa$ cannot be constrained for groups T1 and T2 and is -2.4$\pm0.3$ for group T3 and -1.6$\pm0.3$ for group T4. We confirmed the relationship of a decreasing trend in binary fractions towards late-type stars. No correlation between the spectral type and the orbital period distribution has been found yet, possibly due to the limitation of observational cadence.