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I have list of stellar pairs from The Washington Double Star Catalog (WDS), i.e. I have next parameters:

  • angular separations
  • position angles
  • stellar magnitudes of both components

Additionally I have GAIA DR2 parallaxes (and other parameters) from SIMBAD database. How to distinguish between binary and optical stellar pairs?

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If they are both in the Gaia DR2 catalogue, then a physical binary should have components with similar parallax and proper motion.

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