Talk:Binary mass function

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Cheers.— InternetArchiveBot  (Report bug) 10:03, 22 December 2017 (UTC)

'semi-major axis' vs. 'orbital separation'
Let me first say that this is a very useful article that I often refer to. Thanks to everyone who put it together.

Where a is first introduced, the text mentions "semi-major axis (orbital separation) of the binary system". Am I the only one to find this just a bit confusing? In particular, I take the "semi" term to be something like a half-width, e.g. similar to the arithmetic mean of the periapsis and apoapsis. By contrast, I believe here a really is the full orbital separation? So, for instance, in a symmetric binary with two ~equal masses, it would be the full distance between the binary components? W1810 (talk) 09:45, 26 April 2023 (UTC)