Characterisation of all known multiple stellar systems within 10 pc

TL;DR

This paper comprehensively characterizes all known multiple stellar systems within 10 parsecs, providing detailed data on their properties, multiplicity fractions, and orbital parameters to enhance understanding of local stellar populations.

Contribution

It compiles and analyzes complete data on all known multiple systems within 10 pc, including new orbital solutions and mass measurements, for the first time providing a thorough local stellar multiplicity census.

Findings

Identified 92 multiple systems among 424 stars and brown dwarfs within 10 pc.

Orbital periods range from about one day to millions of years.

Multiplicity fraction decreases with decreasing stellar mass, from 41% to 9.3%.

Abstract

The study of stellar multiplicity offers important constraints on the structure of the Galaxy as well as stellar and planet formation and evolution. Focusing on the most immediate solar neighbourhood benefits from obtaining both complete and accurate data for reliable statistics. Our goal is to describe the solar neighbourhood within 10 pc in terms of multiplicity by evaluating the angular and physical separations, masses, and orbital periods of the systems from the most complete volume-limited sample. We carried out a comprehensive data compilation from the Washington Double Star catalogue and the literature of all known multiple systems at any separation range, and completed this information with a common proper motion and parallax search with Gaia DR3 data. We also used public astrometric and radial-velocity data to compute orbital solutions of seven pairs. From a sample of 424 stars and brown dwarfs within 10 pc we identified 215 of them in 92 systems in double (68), triple (19), quadruple (3), and quintuple (2) configurations. All except eight pairs have been resolved. Their orbital periods range over ten orders of magnitude from about one day to millions of years. We measured precise mass and companion star fractions at different mass intervals. The multiplicity fraction smoothly decreases from 41+-11% for stars with M >= 0.50 Msun to 9.3+-7.4% for stars and brown dwarfs with M <= 0.10 Msun.