A Measurement of Stellar Surface Gravity Hidden in Radial Velocity Differences of Co-moving Stars.

The gravitational redshift induced by stellar surface gravity is notoriously difficult to measure for non-degenerate stars, since its amplitude is small in comparison with the typical Doppler shift induced by stellar radial velocity. In this study, we make use of the large observational data set of the Gaia mission to achieve a significant reduction of noise caused by these random stellar motions. By measuring the differences in velocities between the components of pairs of co-moving stars and wide binaries, we are able to statistically measure gravitational redshift and nullify the effect of the peculiar motions of the stars. For the subset of stars considered in this study, we find a positive correlation between the observed differences in Gaia radial velocities and the differences in surface gravity inferred from effective temperature and luminosity measurements. This corresponds to the first ever measurement of extra-Solar surface gravity induced gravitational redshift in non-degenerate stars. Additionally, we study the sub-dominant effects of convective blueshifting of emission lines, effects of binary motion, and possible systematic errors in radial velocity measurements within Gaia. Results from the technique presented in this study are expected to improve significantly with data from the next Gaia data release. Such improvements could be used to constrain the mass-luminosity relation and stellar models which predict the magnitude of convective blueshift.