Rotational Brownian motion (astronomy) that the rotation axis of the binary is oriented at angle θ at time "t". The evolution equation for "F" is formula_17 If <Δξ>, "a", ρ and σ are constant in time, this becomes formula_18 where μ = cos θ and τ is the time in units of the relaxation time "t", where formula_19 The solution to this equation states that the expectation value of μ decays with time as formula_20 Hence, "t" is the time constant for the binary's orientation to be randomized by torques from field stars. Rotational Brownian motion was first discussed in the context of binary
Brownian meander Brownian meander In the mathematical theory of probability, Brownian meander formula_1 is a continuous non-homogeneous Markov process defined as follows: Let formula_2 be a standard one-dimensional Brownian motion, and formula_3, i.e. the last time before "t" = 1 when formula_4 visits formula_5. Then the Brownian meander is defined by the following: In words, let formula_7 be the last time before 1 that a standard Brownian motion visits formula_5. (formula_9 almost surely.) We snip off and discard the trajectory of Brownian motion before formula_7, and scale the remaining part so that it spans a time interval of length 1. The scaling