Characterising Young Stellar Binaries

Sammanfattning: Stars are dispersed all over the sky within our Galaxy, appearing in large varieties of ages and sizes. How- ever, estimating said traits proves not to always be trivial, but certain circumstances allow us to probe the characteristics of stellar binaries. Fortunately, most stars are found to be part of binary or multiple systems, and through their brightness we can study their sizes, while their dynamical interactions let us derive masses. Although absolute ages are near-impossible to estimate, we posses several methods for constraining age-limits of stars at various evolutionary stages. Theoretical models can provide us with an idea of some of the attributes of stars, but sometimes require assumptions that are not always validated. When fundamental physical laws can be used to deduce individual masses of stellar systems, we procure means to constrain and calibrate those models. As such, the multiplicity of different types of stars is of high importance, which separation and mass distributions can also help us constrain formation scenarios among the different mass-regimes. In this review we compile information regarding the detection of binary and multiple stellar systems, as well as how one can go about to estimate their most fundamental quantities including mass and age. We also compare the different methods and techniques employed throughout the literature, addressing various caveats, examples of usage and the future outlook with coming improvements. In the final part of the review, we present the results from a recent paper about the orbital motions of a triple system, which yield a dynamical mass of the system which shows inconsistencies with the theoretical mass obtained from current low-mass stellar evolutionary models.