A speckle-imaging search for close and very faint companions to the nearest and brightest Wolf–Rayet stars
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT Gravitationally bound companions to stars enable determinations of their masses, and offer clues to their formation, evolution, and dynamical histories. So motivated, we have carried out a speckle imaging survey of eight of the nearest and brightest Wolf–Rayet (WR) stars to directly measure the frequency of their resolvable companions, and to search for much fainter companions than hitherto possible. We found one new, close companion to each of WR 113, WR 115, and WR 120 in the separation range ∼0.2–1.2 arcsec2. Our results provide more evidence that similar-brightness, close companions to WR stars are common. More remarkably, they also demonstrate that the predicted, but much fainter and thus elusive companions to WR stars are now within reach of modern speckle cameras on 8-m class telescopes by finding the first example. The new companion to WR 113 is just 1.16 arcsec distant from it, and is ∼8 mag fainter than the WR star. The empirical probability of a chance line of sight of the faint companion at the position of WR 113 is <0.5 per cent, though we cannot yet prove or disprove if the two stars are gravitationally bound. If these three new detections are physical companions we suggest, based on their narrowband magnitudes, colours, reddenings, and GAIA distances that the companions to WR113, WR 115, and WR 120 are an F-type dwarf, an early B-type dwarf, and a WNE-type WR star, respectively.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".