A unified solution for the orbit and light-time effect in the V505 Sgr system

摘要

The multiple system V505 Sagittarii is composed of at least three stars: a compact eclipsing pair and a distant component, whose orbit is measured directly using speckle interferometry. In order to explain the observed orbit of the third body in V505 Sagittarii and also other observable quantities, namely the minima timings of the eclipsing binary and three different radial velocities (RVs) detected in the spectrum, we thoroughly test a fourth-body hypothesis - a perturbation by a dim, yet-unobserved object. We use an N-body numerical integrator to simulate future and past orbital evolution of three or four components in this system. We construct a suitable χ~2 metric from all available speckle-interferometry, minima-timings, and RV data and we scan a part of a parameter space to get at least some of the possible solutions. In principle, we are able to explain all observable quantities by the presence of a fourth body, but the resulting likelihood of this hypothesis is very low. We also discuss other theoretical explanations of the minima-timing variations. Further observations of the minima timings during the next decade or high-resolution spectroscopic data can significantly constrain the model.