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arXiv · 2603.20371

Radial Velocity Orbital Solutions for Candidate Black Hole and Neutron Star Binary Systems in the Gaia Data Release 3 Catalog

Joshua D. Simon·Casey Y. Lam·Kareem El-Badry·Henrique Reggiani·Sukanya Chakrabarti·Puragra Guhathakurta·Ian B. Thompson·Nidia Morrell·Daniel Huber·Benjamin J. Fulton·Lauren M. Weiss
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Abstract

We present spectroscopic followup observations of binary systems from the Gaia Data Release 3 (DR3) binary catalog that were selected to have large enough mass functions for their companions to be black holes or neutron stars. The selection includes 20 stars that are astrometric and/or spectroscopic binaries, as well as 11 stars with large accelerations both in the plane of the sky and along the line of sight but no DR3 orbital solution. We provide classifications for this entire sample, including radial velocity orbital solutions for 12 binaries. Apart from the previously published binaries Gaia BH1, Gaia BH2, and Gaia NS1, we show that the Gaia orbits are incorrect for all of the stars with candidate dark companions above 2 Msun. We suggest more conservative cuts on the significance and goodness of fit parameters that may be useful for identifying reliable orbital solutions in the tail of the binary star distribution. Although we find no new confirmed black hole or neutron star companions, one accelerating system has a minimum companion mass of 1.16 +/- 0.01 Msun that is likely to be a neutron star or an ultramassive white dwarf. The acceleration catalogs may therefore provide a largely unexplored source of additional wide binaries containing compact objects.

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Joshua D. Simon, Casey Y. Lam, Kareem El-Badry, Henrique Reggiani, Sukanya Chakrabarti, Puragra Guhathakurta, Ian B. Thompson, Nidia Morrell, Daniel Huber, Benjamin J. Fulton, Lauren M. Weiss. 2026-07-23. Radial Velocity Orbital Solutions for Candidate Black Hole and Neutron Star Binary Systems in the Gaia Data Release 3 Catalog. https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.20371

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