HST survey of ONC in H2O 1.4um abs. band. III.

Using the Karhunen-Loeve Image Projection algorithm, we have reprocessed images taken with the IR channel of the Wide Field Camera 3 mounted on the Hubble Space Telescope to unveil faint, close companions in the wings of the stellar point-spread functions. Starting with a sample of 1392 bona fide unsaturated cluster members, we detect 39 close-pair cluster candidates with separation 0.16"-0.77".

The primary masses span a range Mp~0.015-1.27M_{sun}_, whereas for the companions we derive Mc~0.004-0.54M_{sun}_. Of these 39 binary systems, 18 were already known, while the remaining 21 are new detections. Correcting for completeness and combining our catalog with previously detected ONC binaries, we obtain an overall binary fraction of 11.5%+/-0.9%.