TAXONOMY OF BARIUM STARS

Image-tube spectra and photometric observations for 389 barium stars have been used to determine spectral classification, barium intensity, radial velocity, luminosity, and kinematical properties. The objective of this study is to obtain a homogeneous dataset for analyzing barium characteristics in uniform fashion. The analyses show that barium stars appear to have young to old disk kinematics based upon whether they are Ba weak or Ba strong. The Ba II line (4554 angstrom) is also identifiable in dwarf stars; these dwarf barium stars are small in number and weak in intensity. The analyses of the kinematics, luminosities, U,V,W velocity distributions using image-tube radial velocities and statistical parallaxes using proper motions and upsilon components show that the weak barium stars generally tend to have small velocity dispersion, brighter apparent magnitude at about same distance compared to strong Ba stars, thus lower luminosity. The solution for the mean spectroscopic distances, the z-scale height distances and reduced proper motions also confirm the above finding.