Pith Number

pith:K6JASXGV

pith:2026:K6JASXGVW2NJCF4VUU6H675U33

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Searching for the Third Wheel: High-Contrast Imaging Constraints on Tertiaries to Black Hole and Neutron Star Binaries

Aniket Sanghi, Kareem El-Badry, Pranav Nagarajan

Deep imaging rules out main-sequence and hot white-dwarf tertiaries to black hole and neutron star binaries at large separations.

arxiv:2605.16498 v1 · 2026-05-15 · astro-ph.SR · astro-ph.HE

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\usepackage{pith}
\pithnumber{K6JASXGVW2NJCF4VUU6H675U33}

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Record completeness

1 Bitcoin timestamp

2 Internet Archive

3 Author claim open · sign in to claim

4 Citations open

5 Replications open

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The bundle contains the canonical record plus signed events. A mirror can host it anywhere and recompute the same current state with the deterministic merge algorithm.

Claims

C1strongest claim

We rule out plausible MS tertiaries and young, hot WD tertiaries at projected separations ≳500 au for the Gaia compact object binaries and ≳2000 au for the more distant BH LMXBs.

C2weakest assumption

That the injection-recovery tests and contrast curves accurately capture the true sensitivity to bound companions rather than being dominated by residual speckles or unaccounted systematics at the smallest separations.

C3one line summary

High-contrast imaging of 18 compact-object binaries yields no robust tertiary detections and rules out main-sequence tertiaries at projected separations greater than 500 au for Gaia systems and 2000 au for BH LMXBs.

References

81 extracted · 81 resolved · 6 Pith anchors

[1] G., C \'o rsico , A 2010 · doi:10.1007/s00159-010-0033-1

[2] Atri, P., Miller-Jones, J. C. A., Bahramian, A., et al. 2019, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 489, 3116, doi: 10.1093/mnras/stz2335 2019 · doi:10.1093/mnras/stz2335

[3] Atri, P., Miller-Jones, J. C. A., Bahramian, A., et al. 2020, Modern Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 493, L81, doi: 10.1093/mnrasl/slaa010 2020 · doi:10.1093/mnrasl/slaa010

[4] doi:10.1007/978-981-16-4544-0\_151-1 2023 · doi:10.1007/978-981-16-4544-0

[6] Estimating distances from parallaxes. V: Geometric and photogeometric distances to 1.47 billion stars in Gaia Early Data Release 3 · doi:10.3847/1538-3881/abd806

Receipt and verification

First computed	2026-05-20T00:02:25.749607Z
Builder	pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1
Signature	Pith Ed25519 (`pith-v1-2026-05`) · public key
Schema	pith-number/v1.0

Canonical hash

5792095cd5b69a911795a53c7f7fb4decccd53ec5faf10a3af768c513f2af5a4

Aliases

arxiv: 2605.16498 · arxiv_version: 2605.16498v1 · doi: 10.48550/arxiv.2605.16498 · pith_short_12: K6JASXGVW2NJ · pith_short_16: K6JASXGVW2NJCF4V · pith_short_8: K6JASXGV

Agent API

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Verify this Pith Number yourself

curl -sH 'Accept: application/ld+json' https://pith.science/pith/K6JASXGVW2NJCF4VUU6H675U33 \
  | jq -c '.canonical_record' \
  | python3 -c "import sys,json,hashlib; b=json.dumps(json.loads(sys.stdin.read()), sort_keys=True, separators=(',',':'), ensure_ascii=False).encode(); print(hashlib.sha256(b).hexdigest())"
# expect: 5792095cd5b69a911795a53c7f7fb4decccd53ec5faf10a3af768c513f2af5a4

Canonical record JSON

{
  "metadata": {
    "abstract_canon_sha256": "4d88cda7f521938a011daeb55930024704862d6985929e55026ea2dca6bcbf03",
    "cross_cats_sorted": [
      "astro-ph.HE"
    ],
    "license": "http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
    "primary_cat": "astro-ph.SR",
    "submitted_at": "2026-05-15T18:00:06Z",
    "title_canon_sha256": "323f79640f770606c8de0963753523403f9ba74044e5815a1285dc3a02c1492a"
  },
  "schema_version": "1.0",
  "source": {
    "id": "2605.16498",
    "kind": "arxiv",
    "version": 1
  }
}