Our most remote territory Solar system, The area of black, icy debris outside Neptune, is very dense. Out of the reach of the ancient disks of gas and dust, which make up the planets, not all things match the scientific models of the solar system. Now, a pair of researchers have offered to take a new look at this distant secret: our sun is a long-lost twin. And both stars spent their childhood in outer space of the solar system, collecting debris passing through international space.
We can’t see these twins. Wherever it is – if it ever existed – it has been broken from its orbit since the time of our sun before. Since then these two stars would have counted the galaxy more than a dozen times and could end up in totally different regions of space. But the record of those two lost effects on our solar system can remain in our art cloud – the mysterious neighborhood of comets and space rocks on the outer boundaries of our solar influence.
The Ort cloud is a fantastic location. Unlike the planets and asteroids in the inner solar system, which are located on a single flat disk around the sun, they form a hollow field of debris surrounding the solar system in each direction. Compared to the inner planets, these distant drifters experience very little sun Gravity, And can be easily pushed out of their orbit and into interclass space. The farthest objects in that region are barely connected to our sun, flowing 100,000 times farther than the sun. Earth.
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“It’s really in the middle of the nearest star, Alpha Centauri,” said the study’s co-author, Avi Loeb, a Harvard astrophysicist. “If Alpha Centauri also has an ort cloud, if all the stars have ort clouds, they all touch each other like billiard balls and the space is filled with them.”
Our orthotic cloud is less dense than large objects objects than the inner solar system. Fly it into the spaceship and you are unlikely to find anything. Lobeb said, but he still organizes a lot more stuff than that. Probably about 100 billion individual objects, mostly rock and ice fragments, live in the cloud. We can’t see them directly, but there is evidence for them: a comet that sinks into the inner solar system from the Ort cloud at regular intervals.
There is also some evidence for larger items in the Ort Cloud. For the past few years, scientists looking at known objects outside the Neptune cluster have suggested that there may be an unknown planet that could pull them into formation. The planet 9 will be 10 times heavier than Earth, although it remains to be seen. “All the masses outside of Neptune cause problems for astronomers,” Lopbe said. This is due to the fact that the orbiting cloud forms a sphere, while all the planets and asteroids in the inner solar system appear to have formed from a flat disk of dust and gas.
“The question is: how did it come into being?” Lobe told living science. “The popular opinion is that maybe they were scattered from the disks that created the planets.”
There are some things in the cloud that clearly came from the inner solar system, Loeb said. But the large objects in this thick “scattered disk” make up only a fraction – about 1/50 m – of the total number of massive objects orbiting Neptune. And simulations of cloud cloud formation in which all have objects coming from the inner solar system indicate that it must contain somewhere between one-third and one-tenth of the large objects it contains.
“You can’t easily explain a large number of ort cloud object objects this way,” Loeb said.
And if you assume there is a large planet orbiting there, the dense cloud will be even more difficult to explain.
In this case, along with his frequent collaborator, Harvard undergraduate Amir Siraj, Loeb suggested that the sun may have worked with the lost twins to capture objects passing through lost space.
The theory is as follows: Astronomers have already agreed that the Sun, like most stars, may be in tight clusters with many other stars in the galactic pockets of dust and gas. Forms. That stellar nursery was probably full of gue villains – heavy objects like interstellar comets and maybe planets. But on its own, the Sun’s gravity was not strong enough to pull all objects into orbit.
But what if the sun and another star revolve around each other? Throw this binary mate into the mix, and the count changes. Assuming that the two stars are the same size, and orbit the Earth 1000 times apart at a distance of about 1.5% of the light-year (their light-years), their mass gravity can get through holes and ice holes through interstellar means. When the Sun and its two twins broke – their orbits were broken by a close encounter with the third constellation – everyone would have cut the Sun and its twins into a thicker ort cloud than they had captured on their own.
Loeb said there are a few good things about this theory. It nicely explains not only the number of objects and objects in the cloud but also its shape. Random ag objects from deep space would have formed a sphere around the sun, as we see it, not a disk.
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“The beautiful thing is that we can test it,” he said.
If Loeb and Siraj are true, astronomers have underestimated the number of really large objects in the orchard cloud. With a binary companion, the Sun must have captured not only static-imaginary 9 planets from its birth cluster, but many dwarf planets-like objects. Ceres And Pluto of the inner solar system – it will still orbit the farthest part of space.
Right now, there is no evidence for those dwarf planets. But the dim and distant ort cloud is still so weak that their absence in the data is not surprising, Loeb said.
With the completion in Chile in 2021, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) will scan the sky in unprecedented detail for such obscure, distant object objects, Loeb said. If the first long-distance scan of LSST’s space reveals a large number of additional dwarf planets in Planet 9 and the Ort Cloud that would suggest our solar system was once a twin, he said.
“Wherever those star twins end up, if they exist, we’ll never find them again,” Lobib said. Everything in the galaxy, about a billion .. billion years ago has been shaken many times since the dissolution of our Sun’s original birth cluster. But we can imagine what it would look like: no other sun, because when the stars were twins, they were still far apart. Instead it would have felt like a very bright planet, moving very slowly in the sky.
Published on Original Living Science.
