The study of a selected set of 69 double-lined spectroscopic binaries (SB2) with well-defined visual and spectroscopic orbits was carried out. The orbital parallax, the mass, the colour, and the luminosity of each component were derived from observational data for almost all of these systems. We have also obtained an independent estimation of the component masses by comparing the colour–magnitude diagram (CMD) to the stellar evolution tracks reported by Pietrinferni. Nearly all of the observational points on the CMD are located between two tracks of slightly different mass or which fall very close to the one corresponding to a unique mass value. The masses obtained from the stellar model are in good agreement with their empirical values determined by parallax techniques (orbital, Gaia, and dynamical). This means that our adopted model is rather reliable and can therefore be used to infer further information, such as the age of each component in the studied systems. Our results indicate a fair correspondence between the age of primaries and secondary stars within 3σ. Nevertheless, we caution that these age indications suffer of uncertainties due to both inhomogeneities/low precision of the adopted photometric data and possible systematics. Finally, it is statistically shown that along with the orbital and trigonometric parallaxes, the dynamical parallax can serve as a reliable tool for distance estimates.

The complex of star-forming regions in Perseus is one of the most studied due to its proximity (about 300 pc). In addition, its regions show variation in star-formation activity and age, with formation of low-mass and intermediate-mass stars. In this paper, we present analyses of images taken with the Herschel ESA satellite from 70 μm to 500 μm. From these images, we first constructed column density and dust temperature maps. We then identified compact cores in the maps at each wavelength, and characterised the cores using modified blackbody fits to their spectral energy distributions (SEDs): we identified 684 starless cores, of which 199 are bound and potential prestellar cores, and 132 protostars. We also matched the Herschel-identified young stars with Gaia sources to model distance variations across the Perseus cloud. We measure a linear gradient function with right ascension and declination for the entire cloud. This function is the first quantitative attempt to derive the gradient in distance across Perseus, from east to west, in an analytical form. We derived mass and temperature of cores from the SED fits. The core mass function can be modelled with a log-normal distribution that peaks at 0.82 M⊙ suggesting a star formation efficiency of 0.30 for a peak in the system initial mass function of stars at 0.25 M⊙. The high-mass tail can be modelled with a power law of slope ~−2.32, which is close to the Salpeter’s value. We also identify the filamentary structure of Perseus and discuss the relation between filaments and star formation, confirming that stars form preferentially in filaments. We find that the majority of filaments with ongoing star formation are transcritical against their own internal gravity because their linear masses are below the critical limit of 16 M⊙ pc−1 above which we expect filaments to collapse. We find a possible explanation for this result, showing that a filament with a linear mass as low as 8 M⊙ pc−1 can already be unstable. We confirm a linear relationship between star formation efficiency and the slope of dust probability density function, and we find a similar relationship with the core formation efficiency. We derive a lifetime for the prestellar core phase of 1.69 ± 0.52 Myr for the whole Perseus complex but different regions have a wide range in prestellar core fractions, suggesting that star formation began only recently in some clumps. We also derive a free-fall time for prestellar cores of 0.16 Myr.

By combining our improved visual orbit with the last spectroscopic solution of the single-lined spectroscopic binary, MCA 74 (ADS 16672Aa, Ab; HD 219834A), we derived its orbital solution to have a period of 6.321 years. Using the Gaia parallax, a systemic mass of 1.87 ± 0.09 and a mass ratio of q = 0.725 were obtained, which yielded individual masses of 1.07 ± 0.06 and 0.80 ± 0.04 for the main and the secondary components, respectively. The mass and the absolute magnitude of +3.52 confirm that the primary is a late G5–G8 subgiant, while the same parameters of the secondary (Mv = +6.52) suggest that it is an early K2–K3 dwarf.

We present relative astrometric and photometric measurements of visual double stars made in 2013-2014 with PISCO2 installed at the 76-cm refractor of the Côte d'Azur Observatory in Nice (France). Our observation list contains orbital couples as well as double stars whose motion is still uncertain. Three different techniques were used for obtaining measurements: Lucky Imaging, Speckle Interferometry, and the Direct Vector Autocorrelation method. From our observations of 4,864 multiple stars, we obtained 4,952 new measurements with angular separations in the range 0 ′′ .1-14 ′′ and an average accuracy of 0 ′′ .015. The mean error on the position angles is 1 • .0. Most of the position angles were determined without the usual 180 • ambiguity with the application of the direct vector autocorrelation technique and/or by inspection of the Lucky images or the long integration files. We managed to routinely monitor faint systems (m V ≈ 9-11) with large magnitude differences (up to Δm V ≈ 5). We have thus been able to measure 49 systems containing red dwarf stars that had been poorly monitored since their discovery, from which we estimated the stellar masses thanks to Gaia measurements. We also measured the magnitude difference of the two components of 318 double stars with an estimated error of 0.2 mag. Except for a few objects that have been discussed, our measurements are in good agreement with the ephemerides computed with published orbital elements, even for the double stars whose separation is smaller than the diffraction limit. Thanks to good seeing images and with the use of high-contrast numerical filters, we have also been able to obtain 455 measurements with an angular separation smaller than the diffraction limit of our instrumentation, and consistent with those obtained with larger telescopes. Finally, we report 378 measurements of the 296 new double stars that we found in the files obtained during the observations.