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Fox, RF and Hill, TP (2014)

Hubble’s Law Implies Benford’s Law for Distances to Stars

Prerprint Physics arXiv; posted on December 4, 2014.

ISSN/ISBN: Not available at this time. DOI: Not available at this time.



Abstract: A recent article by Alexopoulos and Leontsinis presented empirical evidence that the distances to stars listed in the 2011 HYG database “follow well the probabilities predicted by Benford’s law”, the well known logarithmic statistical distribution of significant digits. The purpose of the present article is to give a theoretical explanation, based on Hubble’s law and mathematical properties of Benford’s law, why star distances might be expected to follow Benford’s law. Conversely, with the logical derivation given here, the observations of Alexopoulos and Leontsinis may be viewed as new independent empirical evidence of the validity of Hubble’s law.


Bibtex:
@unpublished{, AUTHOR = {Fox, Ronald F. and Hill, Theodore P.}, MONTH = {December}, TITLE = {Hubble’s Law Implies Benford’s Law for Distances to Stars}, YEAR = {2014}, DATE = {December 4, 2014}, EPRINT = {arXiv:1412.1536v1 [physics.data-an]}, URL = {http://arxiv.org/abs/1412.1536} }


Reference Type: Preprint

Subject Area(s): Physics