Could assessing the orbital motions of distant red dwarf binaries offer support for a branch of fringe science? Well, probably not... Credit: NASA.
The Sloan Low-mass Wide Pairs of Kinematically Equivalent Stars (SLoWPoKES) catalog was recently announced, containing 1,342 common proper motion pairs (i.e. binaries) ? which are all low mass stars in the mid-K and mid-M stellar classes – in other words, orange and red dwarves.
These low mass pairs are all at least 500 astronomical units distance from each other – at which point the mutual gravitation between the two objects gets pretty tenuous – or so Newton would have it. Such a context provides a test-bed for something that lies in the realms of ‘fringe science’ – that is, Modified Newtonian Dynamics, or MoND. (...)
Read the rest of Astronomy Without A Telescope ? SLoWPoKES (630 words)
© Steve Nerlich for Universe Today, 2011. |
Permalink |
5 comments |
Add to
del.icio.us
Post tags: Modified Newtonian dynamics
Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh
Full story at http://www.universetoday.com/85681/astronomy-without-a-telescope-%e2%80%93-slowpokes/
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment