181 research outputs found
The Mass-to-Light Ratios of the Draco and Ursa Minor Dwarf Spheroidal Galaxies. II. The Binary Population and Its Effect in the Measured Velocity Dispersions of Dwarf Spheroidal Galaxies
We use a large set of radial velocities in the Ursa Minor and Draco dwarf
spheroidal galaxies to search for binary stars and to infer the binary
frequency. Of the 118 stars in our sample with multiple observations, six are
velocity variables with probabilities below 0.001. We use Monte Carlo
simulations that mimic our observations to determine the efficiency with which
our observations find binary stars. Our best, though significantly uncertain,
estimate of the binary frequency for stars near the turnoff in Draco and UMi is
0.2--0.3 per decade of period in the vicinity of periods of one year, which is
3--5 that found for the solar neighborhood. This frequency is high
enough that binary stars might significantly affect the measured velocity
dispersions of some dwarf spheroidal galaxies according to some previous
numerical experiments. However, in the course of performing our own
experiments, we discovered that this previous work had inadvertently
overestimated binary orbital velocities. Our first set of simulations of the
effects of binaries is based on the observed scatter in the individual velocity
measurements for the multiply-observed Draco and Ursa Minor stars. This scatter
is small compared to measured velocity dispersions and, so, the effect of
binaries on the dispersions is slight. This result is supported by our second
set of experiments, which are based on a model binary population normalized by
the observed binary frequency in Draco and Ursa Minor. We conclude that binary
stars have had no significant effect on the measured velocity dispersion and
inferred mass-to-light ratio of any dwarf spheroidal galaxy.Comment: 33 pages, 95kb uuencoded, gzipped postscript; Accepted by
Astronomical Journal; gzipped, tarred postscript of text, tables, figures
available at ftp://as.arizona.edu/pub/edo (binaries_in_dsph.tar.gz
The Dwarf Spheroidal Companions to M31: WFPC2 Observations of Andromeda I
Images have been obtained with the Hubble Space Telescope WFPC2 camera of
Andromeda I, a dwarf spheroidal (dSph) galaxy that lies in the outer halo of
M31. The resulting color-magnitude diagrams reveal for the first time the
morphology of the horizontal branch in this system. We find that, in a similar
fashion to many of the galactic dSph companions, the horizontal branch (HB) of
And~I is predominantly red. Combined with the metal abundance of this dSph,
this red HB morphology indicates that And I can be classified as a ``second
parameter'' system in the outer halo of M31. This result then supports the
hypothesis that the outer halo of M31 formed in the same extended chaotic
manner as is postulated for the outer halo of the Galaxy.Comment: 26 pages using aas2pp4.sty, including 2 tables and 7 figures, to be
published in AJ. Figure 1 is in gif form. To include in main ps file, use xv
to create a ps file called Da_Costa.fig1.ps and uncomment appropriate lines
in .tex fil
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