C3PO: towards a complete census of co-moving pairs of stars – I. High precision stellar parameters for 250 stars

Abstract

ABSTRACT We conduct a line-by-line differential analysis of a sample of 125 co-moving pairs of stars (dwarfs and subgiants near solar metallicity). We obtain high-precision stellar parameters with average uncertainties in effective temperature, surface gravity, and metallicity of 16.5 K, 0.033 and 0.014 dex, respectively. We classify the co-moving pairs of stars into two groups, chemically homogeneous (conatal; |Δ[Fe/H]| ≤ 0.04 dex) and inhomogeneous (non-conatal), and examine the fraction of chemically homogeneous pairs as a function of separation and effective temperature. The four main conclusions from this study are (1) A spatial separation of Δs = 106 au is an approximate boundary between homogeneous and inhomogeneous pairs of stars, and we restrict our conclusions to only consider the 91 pairs with Δs ≤ 106 au; (2) There is no trend between velocity separation and the fraction of chemically homogeneous pairs in the range Δv ≤ 4 km s−1; (3) We confirm that the fraction of chemically inhomogeneous pairs increases with increasing Teff and the trend matches a toy model of that expected from planet ingestion; (4) Atomic diffusion is not the main cause of the chemical inhomogeneity. A major outcome from this study is a sample of 56 bright co-moving pairs of stars with chemical abundance differences ≤ 0.02 dex (5 per cent) which is a level of chemical homogeneity comparable to that of the Hyades open cluster. These important objects can be used, in conjunction with star clusters and the Gaia ‘benchmark’ stars, to calibrate stellar abundances from large-scale spectroscopic surveys.