Binary Star Combined Solution Package

Donald Gudehus                            


The software program "binary" allows one to combine astrometric, speckle, and radial velocity data in order to simultaneously solve for the orbital elements and ratio of semimajor axes, system radial velocity, proper motion, and parallax, if possible, of a binary or multiple star system, by means of the nonlinear least squares routine, "nonlinfit". The source code for OpenVMS and Unix, and executables for VAX, Linux, and Mac OS X are freely available. Some features of the program are:

A companion program "editbinary" allows one to edit values in the standard data files. Arithmetic operations are performed on one or more columns simultaneously. Some of the operations are:

The program "one2two" fits a cosine curve to 1-D interferometric data consisting of projected baseline angle, and projected binary separation, and derives the two-dimensional data point, position angle and separation which can then be used in the above "binary" program.

Also included with the package are four demonstration programs, nl_demo_1.exe, nl_demo_2.exe, nl_demo_3.exe, and nl_demo_4.exe which utilize the nonlinear least squares subroutine, nonlinfit, which is used by binary, and the plot package programs plotcom.exe and xyplot_ascii.exe which are used for directing a plot file to any supported plot device, and for plotting data from one or more ASCII files on any supported plot device, respectively.

The program "binary" is also available in the MIIPS (Multipurpose Interactive Image Processing System) package.

  • Example plot of astrometric data
  • Example plot of astrometric data with parallax and proper motion removed
  • Example color plot with error bars of secondary from speckle data
  • Example plot of primary and secondary from astrometric and speckle data
  • Example plot of a spectroscopic binary
  • Download the 2001 AAS Meeting paper "A Multiple-Star Combined Solution Program - Application to the Population II Binary Mu Cas"
  • Download the Binary Combined Solution Program...

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