As an example of the issue with the orbital elements:
The orbital parameters for Alpha Centauri from Kervella et al. (2016) "
Close stellar conjunctions of α Centauri A and B until 2050" gives the following orbital elements:
Code:
a = 17.592″, i = 79.320°, ω = 232.006°, Ω = 205.064°, e = 0.5208
Plotting this using the transformations that have already been derived for Celestia's binary stars (also used in my exoplanets scripts) gives the following:
Attachment:
File comment: Orbit plot for Alpha Centauri B
alpha.png [ 17.69 KiB | Viewed 3214 times ]
(North is up, East is left. Grid spacing = 5″. Red line indicates periastron position, red arc gives the direction of motion, blue line is the line of nodes, blue tick indicates the side of the orbit pointing away from the solar system). This matches the orbit plot shown in figure 5
The paper for the orbit of Proxima, which shares some of the authors with the paper I got the elements of Alpha Centauri from, gives the following elements for the Proxima orbit:
Code:
a = 8.7 kAU, i = 107.6°, ω = 72.3°, Ω = 126°, e = 0.50
Putting these into the same code results in the following:
Attachment:
File comment: Orbit plot for Proxima
proxima.png [ 16.04 KiB | Viewed 3214 times ]
(Grid spacing = 1°)
This looks completely different from the orbit plotted in their figure 1, including having the opposite sense of rotation!
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