Abstract
WITH the advent of the great American telescopes a new era began. It became possible to detect much closer pairs than before; these offered such a large field that for the first time a distance limit was fixed, beyond which stars should not rank as doubles. This was taken as 5″for stars of the ninth magnitude, but was made wider for brighter stars and for stars of large common proper motion. S. W. Burnham was the first to make a great advance in this direction; in 1906 he brought out a great catalogue of 13,665 pairs, more than two thousand of these being his own discoveries. Dr. Aitken has been a worthy successor. With the aid of Dr. Hussey, who was his fellow-worker for many years, about four thousand new pairs have been found, and a new general catalogue is in course of formation. An important point is that many of the new pairs are extremely close (separation less than half a second). As was to be expected, many of these close pairs showed fairly rapid motion; in fact, one of them has completed a revolution since discovery; Dr. Aitken enjoys the distinction of having made all the observations upon it, and also of computing its orbit. From a physical point of view, the chief importance of double-star astronomy is the information that it leads to on the masses of the stars. At the beginning of this century not more than a dozen star-masses were known with any accuracy; the number has now been greatly increased, the study of eclipsing binaries having added to it. As a result, Sir Arthur Eddington was able to deduce the law correlating mass with absolute magnitude. This important law rests largely on such work as that carried on by Dr. Aitken.
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Dr. Aitken and other Double-Star Observers. Nature 129, 272 (1932). https://doi.org/10.1038/129272b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/129272b0