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Weighing stars from birth to death: mass determination methods across the HRD

  • Review Article
  • Published:
The Astronomy and Astrophysics Review Aims and scope

Abstract

The mass of a star is the most fundamental parameter for its structure, evolution, and final fate. It is particularly important for any kind of stellar archaeology and characterization of exoplanets. There exist a variety of methods in astronomy to estimate or determine it. In this review we present a significant number of such methods, beginning with the most direct and model-independent approach using detached eclipsing binaries. We then move to more indirect and model-dependent methods, such as the quite commonly used isochrone or stellar track fitting. The arrival of quantitative asteroseismology has opened a completely new approach to determine stellar masses and to complement and improve the accuracy of other methods. We include methods for different evolutionary stages, from the pre-main sequence to evolved (super)giants and final remnants. For all methods uncertainties and restrictions will be discussed. We provide lists of altogether more than 200 benchmark stars with relative mass accuracies between \([0.3,2]\%\) for the covered mass range of \(M\in [0.1,16]\,M_\odot\), \(75\%\) of which are stars burning hydrogen in their core and the other \(25\%\) covering all other evolved stages. We close with a recommendation how to combine various methods to arrive at a “mass-ladder” for stars.

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(Figure credit: Stassun et al. 2018)

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(Figure credit: Moya et al. 2018)

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Figure produced from data in Van Reeth et al. (2016), Mombarg et al. (2019) and Pedersen et al. (2021)

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Notes

  1. More than 4360, as of October 9, 2020. Source: exoplanet.eu.

  2. Noticeable exceptions are the most massive globular clusters (\(>10^6\,M_\odot\)), such as \(\omega\) Centauri, which display spreads in age and [Fe/H] (e.g., Villanova et al. 2007).

  3. https://www.astro.keele.ac.uk/jkt/debcat/.

  4. A regularly updated catalogue of binary CSPNe is maintained by David Jones and can be found at http://www.drdjones.net/bcspn/.

  5. See, however the recent redetermination of masses by Reindl et al. (2020).

  6. http://vizier.u-strasbg.fr/viz-bin/VizieR?-source=J/MNRAS/456/3655.

  7. In detail, (n, \(\ell\)) determines a multiplet of \(2\ell +1\) modes that are degenerate in frequency for spherical stars. When the symmetry is broken, e.g., by rotation, the different components of the multiplet show up in the oscillation spectrum, with each component identified by the azimuthal number \(m = -\ell , -\ell +1,\ldots ,\ell -1, \ell\).

  8. https://stellarcollapse.org/nsmasses.

References