The long-period companions of multiple stars tend to have moderate eccentricities

We examined the statistics of an angle gamma between the radius vector of a visual companion of a multiple star and the vector of its apparent relative motion in the system. Its distribution f(gamma) is related to the orbital eccentricity distribution in the investigated sample. We found that for the wide physical subsystems of the 174 objects from the Multiple Star Catalogue f(gamma) is bell-shaped. The Monte-Carlo simulations have shown that our f(gamma) corresponds to the population of the moderate-eccentricity orbits and is not compatible with the linear distribution f(e) = 2e which follows from stellar dynamics and seems to hold for wide binaries. This points to the absence of highly elongated orbits among the outer subsystems of multiple stars. The constraint of dynamical stability of triple systems is not sufficient to explain the rounded-off outer orbits; instead, we speculate that it can result from the angular momentum exchange in multiple systems during their early evolution.