Search Publications

Determination of the optical or physical nature of wide visual binaries by means of two-dimensional conditional probabilities

Brosche, P.; Denis-Karafistan, A.; Denis, C.

A sample consisting of 888 wide visual double stars with known relative proper motions has been processed for the HIPPARCOS input catalog. Brosche et al. (1992) applied two separate criteria on this list to discriminate statistically between physical and optical pairs. The first of these criteria uses the number density contrast, the second the ra…