No Arabic abstract
In the Gaia era, the majority of stars in the Solar neighbourhood have parallaxes and proper motions precisely determined while spectroscopic age indicators are still missing for a large fraction of low-mass young stars. In this work we select 756 overluminous late K and early M young star candidates in the southern sky and observe them over 64 nights with the ANU 2.3m Telescope at Siding Spring Observatory using the Echelle (R=24,000) and Wide Field spectrographs (WiFeS, R=3000-7000). Our selection is kinematically unbiased to minimize the preference against low-mass members of stellar associations that dissipate first, and to include potential members of diffuse components. We provide measurements of H$alpha$ and calcium H&K emission, as well as lithium absorption line, that enable identification of stars as young as $sim$10-30 Myr which is a typical age of a stellar association. We report on 346 stars showing a detectable lithium line, 318 of which are not found in the known catalogs of young stars. We also report 126 additional stars in our sample which have no detectable lithium but signs of stellar activity indicating youth. Radial velocities are determined for WiFeS spectra with a precision of 3.2 $mathrm{km;s^{-1}}$ and 1.5 $mathrm{km;s^{-1}}$ for the Echelle sample.
(abridged) We want to provide further evidence of the origin of the proposed stellar members of Chamaeleon and to identify interlopers from the foreground epsilon Cha and eta Cha associations. To this aim, we compile lists of spectroscopically confirmed members of Chamaeleon I and II, epsilon Cha and eta Cha, and of background objects in the same line of sight. Using Virtual Observatory tools, we cross-match these lists with the UCAC3 catalogue to get the proper motions of the objects. In the vector point diagram, we identify the different moving groups, and use this information to study the membership of proposed candidate members of the associations from the literature. For those objects with available radial velocities, we compute their Galactic space velocities. We look for correlations between the known properties of the objects and their proper motions. The members of the dark clouds exhibit clearly different proper motions from those of the foreground associations and of the background stars. The data suggest that Chamaeleon II could have different dynamical properties from Chamaeleon I. Although the two foreground clusters epsilon and eta Chamaeleontis constitute two different proper motion groups, they have similar spatial motions, which are different from the spatial motion of Chamaeleon I. On the other hand, the space motions of the Chamaeleon II stars look more similar to those of the foreground clusters than to the Chamaeleon I stars, but the numbers are low. Hence, with the available data it is unclear to what extent the stellar populations in both clouds are physically connected to each other. We find no correlations between the proper motions and the properties of the objects in either of the clouds.
We analyse the 100pc Gaia white dwarf volume-limited sample by means of VOSA (Virtual Observatory SED Analyser) with the aim of identifying candidates for displaying infrared excesses. Our search focuses on the study of the spectral energy distribution (SED) of 3,733 white dwarfs with reliable infrared photometry and GBP-GRP colours below 0.8 mag, a sample which seems to be nearly representative of the overall white dwarf population. Our search results in 77 selected candidates, 52 of which are new identifications. For each target we apply a two-component SED fitting implemented in VOSA to derive the effective temperatures of both the white dwarf and the object causing the excess. We calculate a fraction of infrared-excess white dwarfs due to the presence of a circumstellar disk of 1.6+-0.2%, a value which increases to 2.6+-0.3% if we take into account incompleteness issues. Our results are in agreement with the drop in the percentage of infrared excess detections for cool (<8,000K) and hot (>20,000K) white dwarfs obtained in previous analyses. The fraction of white dwarfs with brown dwarf companions we derive is ~0.1-0.2%.
Hot subdwarf-B (sdB) stars in long-period binaries are found to be on eccentric orbits, even though current binary-evolution theory predicts these objects to be circularised before the onset of Roche-lobe overflow (RLOF). To increase our understanding of binary interaction processes during the RLOF phase, we started a long term observing campaign to study wide sdB binaries. In this article we present a composite-binary-sdB sample, and the results of the spectral analysis of 9 such systems. The grid search in stellar parameters (GSSP) code is used to derive atmospheric parameters for the cool companions. To cross-check our results and also characterize the hot subdwarfs we used the independent XTgrid code, which employs Tlusty non-local thermodynamic equilibrium models to derive atmospheric parameters for the sdB component and Phoenix synthetic spectra for the cool companions. The independent GSSP and XTgrid codes are found to show good agreement for three test systems that have atmospheric parameters available in the literature. Based on the rotational velocity of the companions, an estimate for the mass accreted during the RLOF phase and the miminum duration of that phase is made. It is found that the mass transfer to the companion is minimal during the subdwarf formation.
We present spectroscopic follow-up observations of 68 red, faint candidates from our multi-epoch, multi-wavelength, previously published survey of NGC 2264. Using near-infrared spectra from VLT/KMOS, we measure spectral types and extinction for 32 young low-mass sources. We confirm 13 as brown dwarfs in NGC 2264, with spectral types between M6 and M8, corresponding to masses between 0.02 and 0.08$M_{odot}$. These are the first spectroscopically confirmed brown dwarfs in this benchmark cluster. 19 more objects are found to be young M-type stars of NGC 2264 with masses of 0.08 to 0.3$,M_{odot}$. 7 of the confirmed brown dwarfs as well as 15 of the M-stars have IR excess caused by a disc. Comparing with isochrones, the typical age of the confirmed brown dwarfs is $<$0.5 to 5Myr. More than half of the newly identified brown dwarfs and very low mass stars have ages $<$0.5Myr, significantly younger than the bulk of the known cluster population. Based on the success rate of our spectroscopic follow-up, we estimate that NGC 2264 hosts 200-600 brown dwarfs in total (in the given mass range). This would correspond to a star-to-brown dwarf ratio between 2.5:1 and 7.5:1. We determine the slope of the substellar mass function as $alpha = 0.43^{+0.41}_{-0.56}$, these values are consistent with those measured for other young clusters. This points to a uniform substellar mass function across all star forming environments.
We present an overview of the sample of northern hemisphere white dwarfs within 40 pc of the Sun detected from $Gaia$ Data Release 2 (DR2). We find that 521 sources are spectroscopically confirmed degenerate stars, 111 of which were first identified as white dwarf candidates from $Gaia$ DR2 and followed-up recently with the William Herschel Telescope and Gran Telescopio Canarias. Three additional white dwarf candidates remain spectroscopically unobserved and six unresolved binaries are known to include a white dwarf but were not in our initial selection of white dwarfs in the $Gaia$ DR2 Hertzsprung-Russell diagram (HRD). Atmospheric parameters are calculated from $Gaia$ and Pan-STARRS photometry for all objects in the sample, confirming most of the trends previously observed in the much smaller 20 pc sample. Local white dwarfs are overwhelmingly consistent with Galactic disc kinematics, with only four halo candidates. We find that DAZ white dwarfs are significantly less massive than the overall DA population ($overline{M}_mathrm{DAZ} = 0.59,mathrm{M}_odot$, $overline{M}_mathrm{DA} = 0.66,mathrm{M}_odot$). It may suggest that planet formation is less efficient at higher mass stars, producing more massive white dwarfs. We detect a sequence of crystallised white dwarfs in the mass range from $0.6 lesssim M/mathrm{M}_odot lesssim 1.0,$ and find that the vast majority of objects on the sequence have standard kinematic properties that correspond to the average of the sample, suggesting that their nature can be explained by crystallisation alone. We also detect 56 wide binaries including a white dwarf and 26 double degenerates.