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Stellar Separation Shapes Spin–Orbit Alignment in Visual Binaries

  • Authors: Michael Poon, Dang Pham, Marta L. Bryan, Hanno Rein, Jiayin Dong

Michael Poon et al 2026 The Astrophysical Journal Letters 1002 .

  • Provider: AAS Journals

Caption: Figure 6.

Posteriors for the two population model. Top left: the posterior for κ1 (subpopulation with semimajor axis a acutoff). The mode and 68% HDPI is ﹩{\kappa }_{1}=4{8}_{-32}^{+194}﹩, corresponding to spin–orbit angles peaking at ﹩\psi ={{8}_{-4}^{+6}}^\circ ﹩. Top right: 1000 ψ distributions shown as green curves, each corresponding to samples from the κ1 posterior. The black curve is the ψ distribution for κ1 = 48, peaking at 10°, indicating highly aligned spin–orbit angles. Bottom: same as the top two panels, but for κ2 (when a > acutoff). The mode and 68% HDPI is ﹩{\kappa }_{2}={6}_{-2}^{+4}﹩, corresponding to peak ﹩\psi ={2{3}_{-5}^{+5}}^\circ ﹩, indicating weak but not random spin–orbit alignment.

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