Astron. Astrophys. 318, 472-484 (1997)

2. The sample

The sample was put together with the aim to cover those Herbig Ae/Be stars which have circumstellar material in sufficient amount and extension to allow a spatially resolved study by near-infrared speckle interferometry. Thus it was not designed to be particularly rich in binaries, and the number of companions eventually detected perhaps could be low but should not be untypically high.

The first selection criterion was to choose objects from the catalogue of Finkenzeller and Mundt (1984) which showed a large infrared excess (V-L 4.0). However, other selection criteria indicating youth or activity were also used, like CO outflows, optical jets, a position in the Hertzsprung-Russel diagram well above the main sequence, or strong P Cyg profiles. The source list is shown in Table 1, which in addition to the usual general information gives in column (12) the main selection criterion for each object. With the exception of G70.7+1.2, the two AFGL sources and the two IRAS sources, all objects of the source list are contained in the catalogue of Herbig Ae/Be stars by Thé et al.  (1994). Although we do not consider the five extra objects as proper Herbig Ae/Be stars, we kept them in the object list, since they probably are indeed young stars, although of higher mass.

Table 1. Source list

The observational coverage of the objects in the list is quite varied, ranging from a few scattered observations to extensive coverage and published results.

© European Southern Observatory (ESO) 1997

Online publication: July 8, 1998
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