Collaborating with "professional" amateurs: low-mass stars in fragile multiple system

Abstract

The boundary between professional and amateur astronomers gets narrower and narrower. We present several real examples, most of them published in refereed journals, of works resulting from fruitful collaborations between key amateur astronomers in Spain and professional colleagues. The common denominator of these works is the search for binaries, mostly nearby, wide, common proper-motion pairs with low-mass stellar components, including some of the most fragile systems ever found.