A study of visual double stars with early type primaries. IV. Astrophysical data

Astrophysical parameters (MK class, colour excess, absolute magnitude, distance, effective temperature mass and age) are derived from calibrations of the uvbyβ indices for the members of 253 double stars with O or B type primaries and faint secondaries. The photometric spectral classification is compared to the MK classes and the agreement is very good. The derived data together with spectroscopic and JHKL data are used for deciding which pairs are likely to be physical and which are optical and it is shown that 98 (34%) of the secondaries are likely to be members of physical systems. For 90% of the physical pairs the projected separations between the components is less than 25000 AU. A majority of the physical secondaries are late type stars and 50% of them are contracting towards the zero-age main-sequence. Also presented are new uvbyβ data for 43 secondaries and a computer programme for determining astrophysical parameters from uvbyβ data