IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/spr/sprchp/978-981-96-2004-3_4.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

Binary Stars: Uniformity, Ambiguity and Selection

In: Directional and Multivariate Statistics

Author

Listed:
  • R. Arnold

    (Victoria University of Wellington, School of Mathematics and Statistics)

  • P. E. Jupp

    (University of St Andrews, School of Mathematics and Statistics)

Abstract

A binary star is a close pair of stars orbiting around their common centre of mass. It is of interest to astronomers whether the planes of binary star orbits have a common alignment. Observations are often limited by an ambiguity: the direction of the orbital pole (the directed normal to the orbital plane) cannot be distinguished from its reflection in the plane of the sky. Tests of uniformity are presented here that are modifications of Sobolev tests on the sphere. These tests allow also for possible selection effects, in which binary stars may be more or less likely to be detected depending on the inclinations of their orbits as seen from the Earth. Modified Rayleigh and Giné tests are applied to data from a standard catalogue of orbits of visual binary stars. Despite the wide scattering of orbital poles, there is consistent evidence of a lack of uniformity, and some evidence of a common alignment of orbits of binaries that are more than 20 parsecs from the Sun.

Suggested Citation

  • R. Arnold & P. E. Jupp, 2025. "Binary Stars: Uniformity, Ambiguity and Selection," Springer Books, in: Somesh Kumar & Barry C. Arnold & Kunio Shimizu & Arnab Kumar Laha (ed.), Directional and Multivariate Statistics, pages 69-85, Springer.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-981-96-2004-3_4
    DOI: 10.1007/978-981-96-2004-3_4
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a
    for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-981-96-2004-3_4. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.