Summary and Reflections

Abstract

Let me begin by taking a very broad historical perspective on the study of pre-main-sequence binaries. You have seen reference several times at this meeting to that first paper on T Tauri binaries by Joy & Van Biesbroeck (1944). Following that paper there followed a long period that might be called the Decades of Ignorance. I refer here to a period of time in the study of star formation where we largely ignored the fact that we knew that most stars were binaries. The high frequency of binaries among stars is something that we've known for a very long time, well over a century. Indeed, looking back, it is remarkable that the paper in 1982 by Mel Dyck and his collaborators identifying T Tauri as a binary caused such a stir. This paper is sometimes cited as the birth of modern research into young binaries. But how many of our colleagues in the realm of main-sequence binaries had already told us over and over again that most of these young stars had to be binaries? Of course, the reason this important paper caused much ado was in part because T Tauri is the very prototype star of star-formation study.