Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Hot companion


 * The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review).  No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was   no consensus. –MuZemike 23:33, 25 June 2010 (UTC)

Hot companion

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The term "hot companion" is not the one used for these objects: the discovery paper uses "hot compact object", which Google reveals to have been used in discussions of other systems where it is not clear whether the object is a white dwarf, neutron star or black hole, e.g. the usage in the GCVS variable star type list. Furthermore subsequent study of the two objects in question reveals that, contrary to the initial media hype, they are most likely to be white dwarf stars, for which we already have an article. While it might be desirable to have an article about hot compact objects in astrophysics (which may or may not be in binary systems and therefore "companions"), there does not seem to be much rationale for having an article devoted to these two objects alone. Icalanise (talk) 23:11, 18 June 2010 (UTC)


 * The term does not apply to these two objects alone, but is a common astronomical term for describing, well, hot companions of uncertain designation. Delete it for now though, I guess: not much there. — Aldaron • T/C 23:32, 18 June 2010 (UTC)


 * Looks like a term more suited to a dictionary. "Hot companion (n): (in astronomy) a component of a binary system that is hot relative to the primary"... Icalanise (talk) 23:42, 18 June 2010 (UTC)


 * Delete WP:NOTADICTIONARY, and if the central star is something cool, like a red supergiant, and the companion is a hotter star, like say an blue giant, then the "hot companion" is a giant star, according to the definition in the article. 70.29.212.131 (talk) 04:54, 19 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Comment this was previously discussed at WT:ASTRO, see the talk archive (do not reply to that section, it has been archived). 70.29.212.131 (talk) 04:58, 19 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Keep From the title, I was expecting this to be about people like Amy Pond but it turns out to be respectable astronomy. The phenomenon seems reasonably common and merits coverage here.  The suggestion that this is dictionary material is mistaken.  Please see WP:STUB and our editing policy. Colonel Warden (talk) 11:05, 19 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Comment It is an indiscriminate term, like "fast car". It is not a phenomenon, it is a companion to a star that is hotter than the star, such a companion is indiscriminately described, without discriminating between stars and non-stellar objects. 70.29.212.131 (talk) 19:56, 19 June 2010 (UTC)


 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Science-related deletion discussions.  -- • Gene93k (talk) 15:00, 19 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Comment&mdash;Rather than describing a unique class of astronomical objects, the word 'hot' here is little more than an adjective. Why is it noteworthy enough to merit an article? It is not clear that this article is ever going to be anything besides a list.&mdash;RJH (talk) 16:44, 19 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Comment The reason it got an article in the first place was because the NASA press machine decided to market KOI-74b and KOI-81b as being a new class of object, rather than the white dwarf stars a more careful analysis shows they actually are. Besides that, it is a trivial term used to designate hot components of a binary system whose nature is unclear. Icalanise (talk) 17:35, 20 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Comment. I would invite participants in this discussion to look at the Google Scholar search results helpfully listed in the nomination, as none of the comments above seem to address the issue of whether they demonstrate this to be a suitable subject for an encyclopedia. Phil Bridger (talk) 23:03, 19 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Comment the majority of uses on the first many hits at Gscholar deal with hot stars, such as A-type stars, and binary star systems, many of the thermodynamic and stellar dynamics issues of such binary star configurations should be dealt with in the binary star article, and its subsidiary articles such as X-ray binary. 70.29.212.131 (talk) 23:41, 19 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Comment Every single binary star system has a hotter component and a cooler component (since no two stars are perfectly alike, one must be hotter than the other), if the cooler component is the more massive, then the less massive hotter star would be a "hot companion", thus this term is highly indiscriminate. On Wiktionary, this would be deleted as a "SOP term" that can be described using each component term, without a separate definition for the whole (SOP == "sum of parts") 70.29.212.131 (talk) 23:47, 19 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Keep The numerous GScholar hits show this is an accepted and heavily used scientific term. Edward321 (talk) 15:15, 20 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Comment - it is also utterly trivial, as has been noted in the previous comments here. Other widely-used but utterly trivial scientific terms include things like "secondary star" (i.e. the dimmer star in a binary system), "outer binary" (i.e. the top-level orbit in a hierarchical multiple star system). The observation of the fact that some binary stars have hotter secondaries is roughly as notable as the concept that if you roll a die twice, sometimes you get a larger number on the second throw. Icalanise (talk) 17:26, 20 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Given that it's well-established that this phrase has been used in different sources with different meanings, I would say that it's quite a plausible search term. People might well look it up on Wikipedia to see what it actually means.  Perhaps it needs to be a disambiguation page rather than a content page?— S Marshall  T/C 19:40, 25 June 2010 (UTC)
 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.