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It depends whether you are talking about an eclipsing binary or a visual or spectroscopic binary. For an eclipsing binary, phase zero is mid primary eclipse. For visual or spectroscopic binaries, phase zero is at periastron. A plotted phase on a light curve or a radial velocity curve is given by $$\phi(t) = \frac{2\pi}{p}(t - \tau),$$ where $\tau$ is the ...

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Moreno et al. in their paper Eccentric binaries: Tidal flows and periastron events [2011] define the orbital phase as from -0.5 to 0.5, where periastron is at phase 0, and apastron is at -0.5 and 0.5. Orbital phase here is $\phi = \dfrac{t}{P}$, where time $t=0$ at periastron and $P$ is the orbital period. This definition allows them to plot the behavior ...

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Usually, how is phase=0 defined? It is relative to the line of apses perhaps with phase=0 at periastron? The true anomaly, $\theta$, is the angle between the current location of the orbiting particle and its location in the orbit at which it is closest to the central body (called the periapsis/periastron). The word "phase" is used variously in ...

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It seems that the authors are just referring to the accepted model of a pulsar, i.e. a neutron star spinning and emitting beams of radiation at its poles. In that sense, the term is used here no differently than it would be in the context of an isolated pulsar. It's just a very simple way of visualizing why an observer far away appears to see periodic pulses ...

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