DI Herculis and general relativity

[ajtribick]

Well general relativity is still safe... DI Herculis was often used as a counter-example to general relativity as the precession was too slow. But now... Misaligned spin and orbital axes cause the anomalous precession of DI Herculis - all to do with oblateness.

The new question is how the stars ended up in such a configuration, rather than the expected case of aligned spin and orbit.

[t00fri]

Well general relativity is still safe... DI Herculis was often used as a counter-example to general relativity as the precession was too slow. But now... Misaligned spin and orbital axes cause the anomalous precession of DI Herculis - all to do with oblateness.

The new question is how the stars ended up in such a configuration, rather than the expected case of aligned spin and orbit.

A very instructive example for why it's essential that scientists better be very careful before drawing any conclusions about Nature.

F.

[BinaryStars]

Dear Author,

I read, "Misaligned Spin and Orbital Axes causes the anomalous precession of DI Herculis" and I was very excited and concerned. I contacted one of the authors of the paper, Simon Albrecht concerning the fact that there are a number of binary star systems that have precessions different from the theoretical prediction of General Relativity. DI Herculis is the oldest and was known during Einstein's life. The more recently discovered bianry stars with precessions different from the theoretical prediction of General Relativity are listed below. My inquiry was to see if misaligned spin and axes was being used to describe their anomalous precessions.

PSR J1518 +4904
B2303 + 46
V541 Cygni
As Camelopardalis

Again, I enjoyed the reading and hope that the readers will find this information helpful.

[maui]

This paper establishes a viable theoretical connection between the observations of V541 Cygni and DI Herculis with the Pioneer anomaly observations:

http://www.springerlink.com/content/l2328n7528w26202/

Interesting read.

Maui

[maui]

For those of you who have an interest in reading the paper, you can enter the following into your Google search bar:

10.1007/s10509-011-0789-4

Click on the first item that is listed. After you click on this link scroll all the way down to the bottom of the page, and click on the DOI link in the lower left hand corner of the page. This should bring you to the journal website.

On the journal webpage scroll down a little until you see the paper, and click on the floppy disk icon that you see near the upper left hand corner of the paper. This will allow you to save the paper to your desktop. If you have any questions, feel free to post them here.

[maui]

For those of you who have attempted to download the referenced paper unsuccessfully, the following link should bring you directly to it:

http://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10 ... 011-0789-4

Maui