Talk:9 Aurigae

Too succinct or jargonistic at one point

I'd like as I had to ponder it for about 30 seconds to replace "a periodic Doppler Shift" with something that more adequately explains itself; I would prefer the words "continuous Doppler Shift of the absorption lines over a repeating cycle of ...days". I know that's terribly long-winded and meets with my disgust also for that, but it does more justice to what is happening, not some sort of stop-start, sporadic changes in the frequency/wavelength within most of the electromagnetic waves reaching us which the words currently used could equally suggest to the physically uneducated.- Adam37 Talk 19:06, 10 October 2019 (UTC)

Yes, periodic could be interpreted as intermittent. I even thought about it as I wrote it and decided to go with it anyway. I know what it means :) Some other explanation might be better. There are all sorts of radial velocity variations from stars, and the sort that indicates a binary companion is very specific. You could fudge it by comparing to a sine wave, although the variation isn't necessarily strictly sinusoidal. There is an article radial velocity method, heavily focussed on exoplanets but equally applicable to binary stars. Maybe some form of words from there could be adapted, or even a picture. I was just reading at spectroscopic binary, and perhaps mentioning the spectral lines moving back and forth to bluer and redder wavelengths would help. Or go with the less is more approach: mention Doppler shift or radial velocity or something similar, but leave out the details. Lithopsian (talk) 20:02, 10 October 2019 (UTC)