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 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 − 0.19 + 0.24 , 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 − 0.18 + 0.21 , closely matching the result of Chae et al. (2026). This shows that if the three-dimensional orbital separation is forward modelled 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.