2011/09/29 by H. Sana, S. Lacour, Sana, H. +14 · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #Adaptive optics and wavefront sensing #Astronomy and Astrophysical Research #FOS: Physical sciences #Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM) #Solar and Stellar Astrophysics (astro-ph.SR) #Stellar, planetary, and galactic studies #astro-ph.IM #astro-ph.SR
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1109.6654
To appear in Four Decades of Research on Massive Stars, ASP Conf. Ser. # pages, 2 figures
arxiv created 2011/09/29 · openalex publication_date 2011/09/29 · arxiv updated 2011/10/03 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We present the earliest results of our NACO/VLT sparse aperture masking (SAM) campaign to search for binarity in a sample of 60 O-type stars. We detect Delta Ks < 5 mag companions for 20-25% of our targets with separations in the range 30-100 mas (typically, 40 - 200 A.U.). Most of these companions were unknown, shedding thus new light on the multiplicity properties of massive stars in a separation and brightness regime that has been difficult to explore so far. Adding detections from other techniques (spectroscopy, interferometry, speckle, lucky imaging, AO), the fraction of O stars with at least one companion is 85% (51/60 targets). This is the largest multiplicity fraction ever found.