L1551NE - Discovery of a Binary Companion

Abstract

L1551NE is a very young (class 0 or I) low-mass protostar located close to the well-studied L1551 IRS5. We present here evidence, from 1.3mm continuum interferometric observations at ~1'' resolution, for a binary companion to L1551NE. The companion, whose 1.3mm flux density is ~1/3 that of the primary component, is located 1.43'' (~230 A.U. at 160pc) to the southeast. The millimeterwave emission from the primary component may have been just barely resolved, with deconvolved size ~0.82"x0.70" (~131x112 A.U.). The companion emission was unresolved (<100 A.U.). The pair is embedded within a flattened circum-binary envelope of size ~5.4'' x 2.3'' (~860 x 370 A.U.). The masses of the three components (i.e. from the cicumstellar material of the primary star and its companion, and the envelope) are approximately 0.044, 0.014 and 0.023 Mo respectively.

8 pages, 1 figure

References in corpus (1)

• The Multiplicity of the Hyades and its Implications for Binary Star Formation and Evolution

Cited by in corpus (8)

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• Multi-Generational Star Formation in L1551
• Binary and Multiple Star Formation in Magnetic Clouds: Bar Growth and Fragmentation
• High Angular Resolution, Sensitive CS J=2-1 and J=3-2 Imaging of the Protostar L1551 NE: Evidence for Outflow-Triggered Star Formation ?
• AMI radio continuum observations of young stellar objects with known outflows
• Formation of the Unequal-Mass Binary Protostars in L1551 NE by Rotationally-Driven Fragmentation
• Skewed Distributions and Opposite Velocity Gradients of Submillimeter Molecular Lines in Low-Mass Protostellar Envelopes
• ISOCAM observations of the L1551 star formation region