Statistical analysis of a comprehensive list of visual binaries

TL;DR

This paper presents a detailed statistical analysis of a large, bias-corrected dataset of visual binary stars, revealing insights into their observational and physical properties.

Contribution

It provides the most comprehensive, cleaned, and bias-reduced dataset of visual binaries, enabling more accurate statistical studies of these systems.

Findings

Distribution patterns of binary star parameters analyzed

Bias correction improves data reliability

Insights into physical and observational characteristics

Abstract

Visual binary stars are the most abundant class of observed binaries. The most comprehensive list of data on visual binaries compiled recently by cross-matching the largest catalogues of visual binaries allowed a statistical investigation of observational parameters of these systems. The dataset was cleaned by correcting uncertainties and misclassifications, and supplemented with available parallax data. The refined dataset is free from technical biases and contains 3676 presumably physical visual pairs of luminosity class V with known angular separations, magnitudes of the components, spectral types, and parallaxes. We also compiled a restricted sample of 998 pairs free from observational biases due to the probability of binary discovery. Certain distributions of observational and physical parameters of stars of our dataset are discussed.