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Paper: Binaries in Massive Star Formation
Volume: 387, Massive Star Formation: Observations Confront Theory
Page: 93
Authors: Gies, D.R.
Abstract: Massive stars are often found with nearby companion stars. The close companions are detected as eclipsing and/or spectroscopic binaries while wide binaries are found through high angular resolution observations including spectroastrometry, long-baseline and speckle interferometry, lunar occultations, and adaptive optics imaging. All of these methods have distinctive observational biases (including a lack of sensitivity in the period gap between close and wide massive binaries), but the current census suggests that almost all O-stars in clusters and associations have companions. This result indicates that the massive star formation process is fundamentally related to the formation of binary stars. There are a number of promising models for the creation of massive binary stars that depend on the angular momentum and magnetic field properties of the collapsing cloud and on the natal star cluster environment.
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