30. Radial Velocities

Extract

This report covers the period June 1981 to June 1984. and includes some material from IAU Colloquium No. 88, October, 1984.). The field of radial velocities has undergone a renaissance in the last few years as the new radial velocity machines have come into use. Not only can stars of much fainter magnitudes be reached, but the precision of the measured radial velocity has been increased by orders of magnitude. Instead of speaking of velocities accurate to kilometers per second it is now possible to measure velocities to tens of meters per second. Research programs, involving these new techniques are now underway involving the study of hundreds, and in some cases, thousands of faint stars.