A novel technique for the detection of faint secondary companions in spectroscopic binaries

GONZÁLEZ, J.F.; JAQUE ARANCIBIA, M.; TORRES ROBLEDO, S.

La Serena

Congreso; Segunda Reunión Binacional de la AAA y la SOCHIAS; 2018

As a consequence of the strong dependence of the luminosity on the mass in main-sequence stars, the spectrum of the secondary star is not detected in most spectroscopic binaries; 70% of the systems are single-lined spectroscopic binaries (SB1s). In order to improve the statistical knowledge of physical properties of binary stars, particularly the mass-ratio distribution, we developed a technique able to derive basic properties (relative mass, relative flux, and estimated temperature) for very low-luminosity companions in SB1 systems (flux-ratio.1/100). The program is applied to a spectroscopic dataset covering different orbital phases and makes use of spectral separation techniques and cross-correlations with a grid of synthetic spectra. The technique has been developed originally in IRAF but in this work we show the first advances in the implementation in python3 with a graphic environment based on matplotlib. In the future the program will be publicly available on github.