Candidate spectroscopic binaries in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey

¹ Department of Astrophysical Sciences, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544-1001, USA e-mail: [pourbaix;gk]@astro.princeton.edu
² Institut d'Astronomie et d'Astrophysique, Université Libre de Bruxelles, CP. 226, Boulevard du Triomphe, 1050 Bruxelles, Belgium e-mail: pourbaix@astro.ulb.ac.be
³ Department of Astronomy, University of Washington, Box 351580, Seattle, WA 98195, USA e-mail: [szkody;ivezic]@astro.washington.edu
⁴ Apache Point Observatory, PO Box 59, Sunspot, NM 88349, USA e-mail: [sjnk;long;snedden;ank;harvanek;jurek;hbrewington;jcb;jb]@apo.nmsu.edu
⁵ Mt. Suhora Observatory, Cracow Pedagogical University, ul. Podchorazych 2, 30-084 Cracow, Poland
⁶ Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, PO Box 500, Batavia, IL 60510, USA e-mail: neilsen@fnal.gov

Received: 21 March 2005
Accepted: 21 August 2005

Abstract

We have examined the radial velocity data for stars spectroscopically observed by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) more than once to investigate the incidence of spectroscopic binaries, and to evaluate the accuracy of the SDSS stellar radial velocities. We find agreement between the fraction of stars with significant velocity variations and the expected fraction of binary stars in the halo and thick disk populations. The observations produce a list of 675 possible new spectroscopic binary stars and orbits for eight of them.