Gaia Spectroscopic Orbits Validated with LAMOST and GALAH Radial Velocities

TL;DR

This study validates Gaia DR3 spectroscopic binary orbits using external LAMOST and GALAH radial velocity data, creating a large, reliable sample for statistical analysis of binary star properties and evolutionary processes.

Contribution

The paper introduces a method to validate Gaia spectroscopic binary orbits with external RV data, resulting in a large, cleaned sample for detailed binary population studies.

Findings

Identification of inconsistencies in some Gaia orbits

Discovery of a potential bias against short-period, low-mass binaries

Evidence for orbital circularization among main-sequence binaries

Abstract

The recently published Gaia DR3 catalog of 181327 spectroscopic binaries (SB) includes the Keplerian elements of each orbit but not the measured radial velocities (RVs) and their epochs. Instead, the catalog lists a few parameters that characterize the robustness of each solution. In this work, we use two external sources to validate the orbits - 17563 LAMOST DR6 and 6018 GALAH DR3 stars with measured RVs that have Gaia-SB orbits. We compare the expected RVs, based on the Gaia orbits, with the LAMOST and GALAH measurements. Finding some orbits that are inconsistent with these measurements, we constructed a function that estimates the probability of each of the Gaia orbits to be correct, using the published robust parameters. We devise a clean but still very large Gaia SB1 sample of 91740 orbits. The sample differs from the parent sample by the absence of - physically unlikely and hence presumably spurious - short-period binaries with high eccentricity. The clean SB1 sample offers the prospect of thorough statistical studies of the binary population after carefully modeling of the remaining selection effects. At a first look, two possible features emerge from the clean sample - a paucity of short-period binaries with low-mass primaries, which might be a result of some observational bias, and a sub-sample of main-sequence binaries on circular orbits, probable evidence for circularization processes.