Visual binary stars: data to investigate formation of binaries

TL;DR

This paper compiles and analyzes a comprehensive dataset of visual binary stars to study their orbital and physical characteristics, aiming to understand star formation history despite observational challenges.

Contribution

It presents the most complete catalog of visual binaries by cross-matching major datasets and supplements it with additional data, enabling detailed statistical analysis.

Findings

Compiled a list of over 130,000 visual binaries.

Performed statistical analysis of orbital and physical parameters.

Discussed corrections for observational incompleteness.

Abstract

Statistics of orbital parameters of binary stars as well as statistics of their physical characteristics bear traces of star formation history. However, statistical investigations of binaries are complicated by lacking or incomplete observational data and by a number of observational selection effects. Visual binaries are the most numerous observed binaries, the number of pairs exceeds 130000. The most complete list of presently known visual binary stars was compiled by cross-matching objects and combining data of the three largest catalogues of visual binaries. It was supplemented by the data on parallaxes, multicolor photometry, spectral characteristics of the stars of this list taken from other catalogues. This allowed us to compensate partly for the lack of observational data for these objects. Combined data allowed us to check validity of observational values and to investigate statistics of the orbital and physical parameters of visual binaries. Corrections for incompleteness of observational data are discussed. Obtained datasets and modern distributions of binary parameters will be used to reconstruct the initial distributions and parameters of the function of star formation for binary systems.