The massive binary system 9 Sgr revisited: New insights into disentangling methods

Disentangling techniques are often needed to obtain the spectra of the individual components of binary or multiple systems. A thorough analysis of the shift-and-add algorithm of Marchenko et al, PASP, 1999;110:1416 reveals that, in many cases, the line fluxes are poorly reproduced, and spurious wings appear. The causes of these discrepancies are discussed, and a new disentangling package, QER20, is presented, which significantly reduces these errors and vastly increases the performance. When applied to the massive binary 9 Sgr, our new code yields line fluxes that are notably different from those previously published and lead us to revise the spectral classification to slightly earlier subtypes: O 3 V ((f +)) for the primary and O 5 V ((f)) for the secondary. We show that, with the MME98 algorithm, the classification of massive stars in binaries can be off by several subtypes, while there are no such errors when the QER20 package is used.