Talk:Albireo

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I've taken out the phrase about the distance and orbital period of the binary system, since I've found pages saying that the distance between pair stars is 4400 AU with orbital period of 7300 earth year, such as [1]. --Puzzlet Chung 06:58, 20 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Something is not right with these numbers. Kepler's third law can be expressed as a³ = (m₁ + m₂)P². If we give a total mass of, say, 10 Suns, orbital period of the stars would be still about 92000 years. But in the original article, distance was 44 AU, which is wrong. In that case orbital period would be much less than Pluto's. This article [2] gives possible orbital period of 7800 years. --Jyril 09:04, Mar 20, 2005 (UTC)

I replaced the section on Albireo as a triple star -- I was some years later and for several years a member of the team which had made the first high-precision measurements in 1976, and made some of the circa 1990 observations myself using the Kitt Peak 4m telescope. The catalogue of interferometric observations by all groups of this object (and all other binary stars) may be found in the Fourth Catalog of Interferometric Measurements of Binary Stars, available at the US Naval Observatory, http://ad.usno.navy.mil/wds/int4.html. Don Barry, Cornell University.