Topic summary
Binary stars
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Binary star.
Spectroscopic binaries
Binary stars that are both visual and spectroscopic binaries are rare and are a valuable source of information when found. About 40 are known. Visual binary stars often have large true separations, with periods measured in decades to centuries; consequently, they usually have orbital speeds too small to be measured spectroscopically. Conversely, spectroscopic binary stars move fast in their orbits because they are close together, usually too close to be detected as visual binaries. Binaries that are found to be both visual and spectroscopic thus must be relatively close to Earth.