Orbital solutions and spectroscopic metallicities for a second set of 40 spectroscopic binaries found in an extended version of the Carney and Latham survey of proper-motion stars are reported. To investigate the distribution of orbital eccentricity versus period for a pure sample of halo binaries, only those systems more metal poor than m/H = -1.6 are selected. The transition between circular and eccentric orbits is found to occur at a period of about 19 d. This supports the interpretation that tidal circularization has been more important on the main sequence than during the premain-sequence stage for the sample of old binaries in the halo.
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Latham et al. (1992) studied this question.