No Gravitational Anomaly in Wide Binaries from Forward Modeling of 3D Orbits

Recent work by Chae et al. (2026) reported a gravitational anomaly in 36 wide-binary pairs, finding a gravity boost factor of γ G eff/G N about 1.60-0.14+0.17 at low accelerations, consistent with predictions from Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND). We reanalyze the same dataset using a hierarchical Bayesian model that infers a global γ across all systems while fitting three-dimensional orbital elements. Our model yields γ= 1.00+0.24-0.19, consistent with Newtonian gravity (γ= 1). To identify the source of the discrepancy, we perform a test using an approach similar to Chae et al. (2026), replacing the semi-major axis with a geometric de-projection of the observed projected separation. This test yields γ= 1.56+0.21-0.18, closely matching the result of Chae et al. (2026). This shows that if the three-dimensional orbital separation is forward modeled using an independent semi-major axis parameter and then projected into the space of the observables, the relative velocities of wide binaries are consistent with Newtonian gravity.