Dark Companions of Stars : Astrometric Commentary on the Lower End of the Main Sequence

If you want to understand the invisible, look careful at the visible. The Talmud A 'bird's eye' or rather a distant spacecraft's view of the solar system reveals an assembly of planets, terrestrial, giant and Pluto. The orbital motions are in the same sense, counter clockwise, as seen from the north of the general flattened space within which the planetary motions are confined. This state of affairs is corevolving and, more or less, coplanar. The rotations are in the same sense as the revolutions, with the strikiiig exception of Uranus whose sense of rotation is perpendicular to its plane of revolution. As time goes by, most of the planets remain fairly close to a general plane and at no time stray unduly far from it; they remain confined within a rather narrow box or disk with a large 'equatorial' extent. The most distant planet, Pluto, requires a diameter of some 80 astronomical units for the disk. One astronomical unit is the distance of the Earth to the Sun, to be more precise the length of half the major axis of the Earth's slightly elliptical orbit around the Sun, and amounts to nearly 149600000 km. Front Matter....Pages 209-220 Introduction....Pages 221-223 The ‘Fixed’ Stars and the ‘Wandering’ Planets....Pages 225-230 Stellar Motions....Pages 231-235 Stellar Distances....Pages 236-243 Stellar Parameters....Pages 244-250 The Nearby Stars....Pages 251-257 The Lower End of the Main Sequence....Pages 258-262 Our Solar System....Pages 263-267 Origins....Pages 268-275 Historical I....Pages 276-280 Historical II....Pages 281-289 Perturbations....Pages 290-296 Perturbations. Early mostly Photographic Studies....Pages 297-300 Perturbations. Current Photographic Studies....Pages 301-304 Two Cases of Serendipity: Ross 614 and VW Cephei....Pages 305-311 Astrometric Study of Barnard’s Star....Pages 312-322 Epilogue....Pages 323-327