Recent models of how stars form add weight to the hypothesis that most – if not all – stars are born in the trash with at least one sibling.
Our star at the center of the solar system may be no exception, and some astronomers suspect that the Sun’s estranged twin may be to blame. Dinosaur death.
After analyzing data from radio surveys conducted on dust clouds in the constellation Perseus, researchers from the University of California at Berkeley and the Harvard-Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory concluded in 2017 that all Sun-like stars may have been born with companions.
“We ran a series of statistical models to see if we could calculate the relative clusters of young and binary individual stars for all the spacers in the Perseus Molecular Cloud, and the only model that could reproduce the data was the model in which all stars originally formed. as broad binaries,” UC Berkeley astronomer Stephen Staller said: in June 2017.
For years, astronomers have wondered whether the large number of binary star systems and the three stars in our galaxy were created close to each other, or whether they fell together after their formation.
The hypothesis is “born together” is my favorite, And advanced simulation It has been shown in recent decades that nearly all stars can be born as multiples that often rotate on their own.
Unfortunately, the empirical evidence supporting these simulations is limited, which makes this new work somewhat interesting.
“Our work is a step forward in understanding how binaries form and the role that binaries played in early stellar evolution.” Staler said.
part of Scan Buffered Disks and VLA Multiplicity (VANDAM for short), the researchers mapped radio waves leaking from a dense dust cocoon some 600 light-years away that contains the entire nursery of young stars.
The Van Damme survey made it possible to count stars less than half a million years old called Class 0 stars – just children in stellar terms – and stars slightly older between 500,000 years and a million years, called Class 1.
Combined with data about the shape of the surrounding dust cloud, the scientists found 45 single stars, 19 binary star systems, and five others containing more than two stars.
While their results predict that all stars are born as binary, they modified their conclusion to account for limitations in their model by saying that most stars that form in dense cores of dust clouds are born in pairs.
“I think we have the strongest evidence for such a statement,” Staler said at the time.
Looking closely at the distances between the stars, the researchers found that all the binaries separated by gaps of 500 AU or more were Class 0 and aligned with the axis of the cloud like the surrounding egg.
On the other hand, Class 1 stars tend to bump into each other at a distance of about 200 AU and not parallel to the “egg” axis.
“We don’t know exactly what that means yet, but it’s not random and should say something about the way broad binaries are formed,” Sarah Sadavoy said From the Harvard-Smithsonian Astrophysics Observatory.
If most stars are born with mates, where are we?
A distance of 500 AU is roughly 0.008 light years, or just under 3 light days. For comparison, Neptune is about 30 AU away, the Voyager 1 probe is currently just under 140 AU, and the closest known star. Proxima Centauri is 268770 AU.
So if the Sun has a twin, it’s almost certainly not easily visible in our area.
but There is a hypothesis That our sun has a twin who likes to swing once in a while, churning things out.
Named Nemesis, this theoretical troublemaker has been proposed as the reason behind Earth’s 27 million-year cycle of extinctions, including those that cause most of the extinctions. dinosaur.
An astronomer from the University of California, Berkeley named Richard Mueller 23 years ago suggested that a red dwarf star 1.5 light years away can periodically travel across the icy outer boundary of our Solar System, churning material with its gravity, dropping some space rock in our path.
Passing stars such as brown dwarfs could also explain other anomalies in the periphery of our solar system, such as Strange wide orbit dwarf planet Our master.
There’s no sign of Nemesis, but our long lost Sun binary partner can fulfill it.
“We said, ‘Yes, there may have been enemies for a long time,'” Staler said.
In this case, our Sun appears to have accumulated the lion’s share of dust and gas, leaving its dark, dwarf twin.
No wonder he was a little angry.
This research was published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
This version of this article was first published in June 2017.
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