For all of human history, we have just looked up and seen a single sun, but a new study claims we had almost a second. This scenario, proposed by astronomers at the Center for Astrophysics at Harvard & Smithsonian, has shaped our solar system like a binary with another star eventually disappearing. This may explain some of the more confusing things about the solar system such as the nature of the Oort Cloud and even the expensive Planet Nine.
Astronomers know that multi-star solar systems are ordinary – the Centauri system exists right next to them, and it consists of three stars. The new paper, written by Avi Loeb and Amir Siraj, suggests that a now-missing binary companion for our solar light may reflect on the confusing events in the outer solar system. Specifically, it could explain why we have such a voluminous Oort Cloud.
The Oort cloud lies at the very edge of the solar system – it is past Neptune, past Pluto, and even beyond the farthest Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs). Unlike the Kuiper Belt, which is donut-shaped, the Oort Cloud is a spherical area of space filled with icy pieces of overlying material, such as comets that never approach the inner solar system. To date, no model for solar system formation has been able to explain the volume of the Oort Cloud. However, when you add a second sun, things make more sense.
Alpha Centauri AB is on the left, Beta Centauri on the right, and Proxima Centauri is in the center of the red circle. Image courtesy of Wikipedia.
The study states that our sun remained gravitationally attached to another star after both were formed from the same molecular cloud, sometimes referred to as a stellar nebula. If the solar system had a second star with about the same mass as the sun, it could have helped to bulge the Oort Cloud. Astronomers believe that it is common for stars to disperse from a cloud to formation, often due to gravitational interactions with other stars in the “birth cluster.” So, this extra star helped sail in Oort Cloud material, and then drifted away billions of years ago, and just became another solar star in our little corner of the galaxy like Epsilon Indi or Tau Ceti.
A missing sun could also explain the Planet Nine conundrum. Astronomers have identified unusual pest disturbances in the orbits of some KBOs, that is eat there impact on their jobs. If it is indeed a planet, the leading explanation is that it formed closer to the sun and migrated outward. However, Loeb and Siraj say that a star that passed close enough to pull the twin away from the sun could also be left behind: a planet. Planet Nine is perhaps an alien planet we conquered when its original star slipped past. This is of course all hypothetical, but it would explain some things.
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