Astronomers studying stars find that all of the ones like our sun were born twins. So where’s our sun’s twin? Some scientists think it had one long ago, which they named Nemesis. There’s even speculation that it might’ve killed off the dinosaurs.
Star systems containing two and even three stars are plentiful in our galaxy.
In fact, the nearest system to ours, Alpha Centauri, is a three star system. For years, scientists have wondered about the abundance of binary star systems. Are the stars born together or does the gravity of one pull in another sometime after birth? The born together theory has been more popular among astronomers.So what happened to Nemesis? If there was one, researchers believe it broke free and shot off into the Milky Way, vanishing into obscurity billions of years ago. Two astronomers recently changed how we view the birth of stars, including our own sun’s, by studying a region of the Perseus molecular cloud.
This is an egg-shaped dust cloud 600 light years away. It’s essentially a nursery for stars. We now know that stars born in the dense centers of such clouds are always born binary.
Stars are born in the dense hearts of dust clouds. NASA Jet Propulsion Lab. Caltech.
Researchers gathered data through radio and visual observations. The radio observations were made at the Very Large Array in New Mexico, while the visual ones took place at the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in Hawaii. Astronomers observed 55 young stars in 24 systems. All of them were multi-star systems, most of them binary.
They also studied 45 single star systems. Steven Stahler is a research astronomer at UC, Berkeley. He’s the…
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