Astron. Astrophys. 364, 665-673 (2000)

2. Observing program

Since 1995 we observe a distance-limited-sample of solar neighbourhood M dwarfs with adaptive optics imaging and high accuracy radial-velocity monitoring (Delfosse et al. 1999c, for a full presentation of the project). This long term effort has two main motivations:

• determine the multiplicity statistics of disk M dwarfs with negligible incompleteness corrections,

• measure very accurate stellar masses.

To specifically address the second goal, we have complemented the main distance limited sample with a few well known M dwarfs binaries, beyond its distance or declination limits. These additional binaries have periods longer than 1 year (shorter period systems beyond a few parsecs are unresolved by 4 meter-class telescopes in the near-IR) and shorter than 10 years (to limit the timescale of the program).

© European Southern Observatory (ESO) 2000

Online publication: January 29, 2001
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