Contents
Images
Upload your image
DSS Images Other Images
Related articles
The Geneva-Copenhagen survey of the Solar neighbourhood. Ages, metallicities, and kinematic properties of 14 000 F and G dwarfs
We present and discuss new determinations of metallicity, rotation, age,kinematics, and Galactic orbits for a complete, magnitude-limited, andkinematically unbiased sample of 16 682 nearby F and G dwarf stars. Our63 000 new, accurate radial-velocity observations for nearly 13 500stars allow identification of most of the binary stars in the sampleand, together with published uvbyβ photometry, Hipparcosparallaxes, Tycho-2 proper motions, and a few earlier radial velocities,complete the kinematic information for 14 139 stars. These high-qualityvelocity data are supplemented by effective temperatures andmetallicities newly derived from recent and/or revised calibrations. Theremaining stars either lack Hipparcos data or have fast rotation. Amajor effort has been devoted to the determination of new isochrone agesfor all stars for which this is possible. Particular attention has beengiven to a realistic treatment of statistical biases and errorestimates, as standard techniques tend to underestimate these effectsand introduce spurious features in the age distributions. Our ages agreewell with those by Edvardsson et al. (\cite{edv93}), despite severalastrophysical and computational improvements since then. We demonstrate,however, how strong observational and theoretical biases cause thedistribution of the observed ages to be very different from that of thetrue age distribution of the sample. Among the many basic relations ofthe Galactic disk that can be reinvestigated from the data presentedhere, we revisit the metallicity distribution of the G dwarfs and theage-metallicity, age-velocity, and metallicity-velocity relations of theSolar neighbourhood. Our first results confirm the lack of metal-poor Gdwarfs relative to closed-box model predictions (the ``G dwarfproblem''), the existence of radial metallicity gradients in the disk,the small change in mean metallicity of the thin disk since itsformation and the substantial scatter in metallicity at all ages, andthe continuing kinematic heating of the thin disk with an efficiencyconsistent with that expected for a combination of spiral arms and giantmolecular clouds. Distinct features in the distribution of the Vcomponent of the space motion are extended in age and metallicity,corresponding to the effects of stochastic spiral waves rather thanclassical moving groups, and may complicate the identification ofthick-disk stars from kinematic criteria. More advanced analyses of thisrich material will require careful simulations of the selection criteriafor the sample and the distribution of observational errors.Based on observations made with the Danish 1.5-m telescope at ESO, LaSilla, Chile, and with the Swiss 1-m telescope at Observatoire deHaute-Provence, France.Complete Tables 1 and 2 are only available in electronic form at the CDSvia anonymous ftp to cdsarc.u-strasbg.fr (130.79.128.5) or viahttp://cdsweb.u-strasbg.fr/cgi-bin/qcat?J/A+A/418/989
| The Maximum Age of Trapezium Systems
We sought to determine the maximum age of Trapezium systems by studyingpossible trapezium systems that were selected independently of theiroccurrence in H II regions. We started with the unpublished catalog byAllen, Tapia, & Parrao of all the known visual systems having threeor more stars in which the maximum separation is less than 3.0 times theminimum separation. Their catalog has 968 such systems whose mostfrequent primary type is F, which does not describe young systems. Witha CCD on the Kitt Peak 0.9 m telescope we obtained UBV frames for 265systems accessible with our equipment on Kitt Peak. The frames were usedto obtain UBV photometry for about 1500 stars with an accuracy of+/-0.04 mag between V=7 and 14 mag. Also these frames were used toobtain astrometry with an accuracy of +/-0.015d in position angle and+/-0.01" in separation. For the brightest star in each system weobtained a spectral type to determine the distance and reddening to thesystem. The measures were used to determine physical membership fromstars that (1) fit a single color-magnitude diagram, (2) fit a commoncolor-color diagram, and (3) show no astrometric motion compared tovisual measures made (mostly) a century ago. Combining the results withspectroscopic data for 20 additional Allen et al. systems by Abt, wefound that 126 systems had only optical companions to the primaries, 116systems contained only a single physical pair, 13 were hierarchicalsystems with 3-6 members and having separation ratios of more than afactor of 10, two were small clusters, and only 28 fitted the criteriaof Trapezium systems. However, as shown by Ambartsumian, about 9% of thehierarchical systems should appear to be Trapezium systems inprojection. Those, like other hierarchical systems, have a broaddistribution of primary spectral types. We isolated 14 systems that seemto be true Trapezium systems. They have primary types of B3 or earlier,indicating a maximum age of about 5×107 yr. This upperlimit is consistent with the estimate made by Allen & Poveda for anage of several million years for these dynamically unstable systems.These Trapezia are also large with a median radius of 0.2 pc and amaximum radius of 2.6 pc. We asked why the sample of 285 possibleTrapezium systems yielded only 14 true ones, despite the attempt made byAllen et al. to eliminate optical companions with a ``1% filter,'' i.e.,demanding that each companion have less than a 1% chance of being afield star of that magnitude within a circle of its radius from theprimary. The explanation seems to be that the double star catalogs arebased mostly on BD magnitudes that, fainter than V=12 mag, aresystematically too faint by 1 mag.
|
Submit a new article
Related links
Submit a new link
Member of following groups:
|
Observation and Astrometry data
| Constellation: | Ηρακλής |
| Right ascension: | 18h06m54.07s |
| Declination: | +46°46'42.9" |
| Apparent magnitude: | 8.325 |
| Distance: | 133.69 parsecs |
| Proper motion RA: | 2.1 |
| Proper motion Dec: | 44 |
| B-T magnitude: | 8.723 |
| V-T magnitude: | 8.358 |
Catalogs and designations:
|
INHABITED SKY
