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abstract
TODCOR is a new TwO-Dimensional CORrelation technique to measure radial velocities of two components of a spectroscopic binary (Zucker and Mazeh 1993, ApJ, in press). Assuming the spectra of the two components are known, the technique correlates an observed binary spectrum against a combination of the two spectra with different shifts. TODCOR measures simultaneously the radial velocities of the two stars by finding the maximum correlation. A few real single-line spectroscopic binaries already have been turned into double-line systems with TODCOR, demonstrating the power of the technique.
One of the advantages of TODCOR is its ability to detect a very faint companion in a combined spectrum, and to measure its radial velocity. We present numerical tests in which we applied TODCOR to simulated spectra which were prepared as combinations of two observed infrared spectra with various luminosity ratios, together with random noise. These tests show that TODCOR can detect in principle a very faint secondary spectrum and measure correctly its velocity, provided the combined spectrum has adequate spectral coverage and S/N. Measuring the radial velocity of the faint secondary will enable us to estimate its mass, making the technique a very useful tool in the search for brown dwarfs and giant planets around nearby stars.
