According to experts, there is evidence that all stars in the universe are born in pairs.
For decades, scientists have speculated that our sun has a twin called NEMESIS, a dwarf star responsible for throwing objects from the outer solar system towards our planet.
In fact, Nemesis is possibly responsible for the mass extinctions that have occurred on Earth over millions of years.
Left image: radio image of a young binary system. Lower Right: Image of a three-star system formed from a dust disk.
Everything is found in the Perseus molecular cloud. Top right: A binary located in the region of IC 348 where two stars interact to emit pulses of light.
Astronomers use the term "binary system" to refer to two stars that are so close to each other that they move around a common center of mass.
This configuration of star formations is quite common in the universe, which prompted some researchers to question whether our Sun could be part of one of such systems.
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A group of scientists from the universities of Harvard and Berkeley conducted a study, the results of which show that all stars are born, forming binary systems, and that our Sun can not be an exception to the general rule.
In fact, many stars in the universe have faithful satellites, which we can observe if we look at our closest galactic neighbor, Alpha Centauri, a solar system that consists of three stars:
Alpha Centauri A and Alpha Centauri B, which form the binary star system Alpha Centauri (also called Rigil Kentaurus), as well as the small and faint red dwarf Alpha Centauri C (also called Proxima Centauri).
Inspired by this fact, astronomers analyzed a hypothesis formulated decades ago by physicist R. A. Müller, which suggests that our Sun has an undetected partner called Nemesis, capable of generating disturbances in the Oort cloud with devastating consequences for the inner parts of our solar system.
In fact, it would even explain the deadly cycle of mass extinctions that occur on Earth every 27 million years.
Back in the 1980s, experts noticed that mass extinctions on our planet, like those that wiped out the dinosaurs, fit into this pattern.
This raised many questions, and the long pauses between events forced them to turn to the Universe for an explanation.
Then the scientist Richard Mueller from the University of California Berkeley suggested that the culprit of these tragedies could be the twin of the Sun, located 1.5 light years away.
While no evidence of Nemesis has been found, new research has shown hope, proving that all stars and even our Sun are born with a twin, which means that somewhere out there, a second Sun that may still be hiding from us …
According to news.berkeley.edu, the new claim is based on radio exposure to a giant molecular cloud, with newly formed stars in the constellation Perseus, and a mathematical model that can only explain Perseus observations if all solar stars are born binaries.
This is a radio image of a very young binary star system, less than a million years old, that formed in a dense core (oval outline) in the Perseus molecular cloud.
“We say yes, there was probably a nemesis, a long time ago,” said co-author Stephen Stahler, an astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley.
“We ran a series of statistical models to see if we could account for the relative populations of young single stars and binaries of all partitions in the Perseus molecular cloud, and the only model that could reproduce the data was one in which all stars form initially as binaries. systems.
"These systems either shrink or break apart over a million years."
In recently published papers, experts refer to "wide binaries" because the two stars are separated by more than 500 astronomical units, or UA, where the astronomical unit is the average distance between the Sun and Earth (93 million miles).
Experts explain that our sun's wide binary satellite would be 17 times farther from the Sun than its farthest planet today, Neptune.
Based on this model, the sun's sibling most likely escaped and mixed with all the other stars in our region of the Milky Way galaxy and is no longer visible.
"The idea that many stars form with a companion has been proposed before, but the question is: how much?" said first author Sara Sadavoy, a NASA Hubble employee at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory.
“Based on our simple model, we say that almost all stars form with a companion. The Perseus cloud is usually considered a typical low-mass star-forming region, but our model needs to be tested in other clouds."