Our sun probably had a twin

A recent study claims that pretty much all sunlike (low-mass) stars are born as binaries. They then tend to either form a close binary or break up (60% chance) within a million years after birth.

So yeah, there might have been a "Nemesis" in the early life of the sun. I wonder how much it might have affected/helped the formation of planets.

news.berkeley.edu...

Yup, wonder to how if affected things, if even. Another source says this,

“Astronomers looked hard for it, back in the 1980s, but it was never found, and the search was abandoned.

“It was supposed to send comets crashing into the Earth, thus explaining mass extinctions, like those of the dinosaurs. It would now be thousands of light years distant, and impossible to find.”

Source

a reply to: dreamingawake

It would now be thousands of light years distant

But how..
they do not know what direction its traveling or at what speed..
It could be traveling in the same lane around the milky way as us.. behind or in front.. guess work

originally posted by: Spacespider
a reply to: dreamingawake

It would now be thousands of light years distant

But how..
they do not know what direction its traveling or at what speed..
It could be traveling in the same lane around the milky way as us.. behind or in front.. guess work

We see the stars it's not near us. That's why we don't know if there was a twin. But it's very likely because stars are born in nebulas. But with our sun it's been so long we can't even say where that was.

a reply to: dreamingawake

Yeah, it would have separated very early, long before the dinosaurs.

But the accretion disk that condensed to the planets we know would probably have looked pretty wild.

youtube science experts have known this for years ... the other one is called Niburu

Wasnt Jupiter a failed star? Maybe the Sun took most of the energy from the binary, out grew it's twin and its twin was cast aside into cooling which became a giant ball of gases?

We have so much to learn about solar mechanics and the functionalities of birthed solar systems..

Not being a smartass here but, is this really new? It's common knowledge in the astronomical community that most stars are not born alone.

What if the sister star was perfectly in-line with the sun and as earth orbited, it would be perfect enough for us to not see it? Like the dark side of the moon. I was reading something about "nemesis" from a very questionable source that stated there was planets just outside the ort cloud that didn't orbit they had a fixed position and the gravitational pull from the sun combined with some type of solar wind balanced out the suns pull so it doesn't get dragged into the sun. I honestly believe there is more beyond the ort cloud. Can't recall the name but there's a new revolutionary telescope soon to be operational that makes hubble look like a piece of 19th century technology and I'm not talking about the james webb telescope although im really looking forward to that.

originally posted by: Elementalist
Wasnt Jupiter a failed star? Maybe the Sun took most of the energy from the binary, out grew it's twin and its twin was cast aside into cooling which became a giant ball of gases?

We have so much to learn about solar mechanics and the functionalities of birthed solar systems..

It's commonly referred to as one, however it has nowhere near the mass actually necessary for a sustained stellar fusion process to take place. So in a sense, it is a smaller version of the kind of body that eventually becomes a star, but by almost 2 orders of magnitude. It would be more accurate to call Jupiter a "failed brown dwarf" which themselves are not even considered "real" stars because they don't have a sustained fusion process.

originally posted by: moebius
a reply to: dreamingawake

Yeah, it would have separated very early, long before the dinosaurs.

But the accretion disk that condensed to the planets we know would probably have looked pretty wild.

Long, long, long before the dinosaurs, I might add.

The era of the dinosaurs was a relatively recent time compared to the entire history of life on Earth, and certainly compared to the history of the solar system.

a reply to: moebius

I remember reading about this some time ago. I thought it was accepted that we did have a sister star, or in our solar system with Jupiter being what didnt develop into or whats left of that lost star.

Also heard that it may be around but because of the orders of magnitude we are talking about, it could be dancing around our star, but still be VERY far away. We SHOULD see it if that were true, but who knows what could be in the way.

If we did just lose it I hope it found a home somewhere and didnt just die out. Maybe our sun ate it.

a reply to: Elementalist

Yep Jupiter is the Suns twin and they say it's getting hotter , Wonder what would happen if it ignites . It has enough moons to be it's own Solar system.

a reply to: tadaman

Jupiter definitely isn't a "leftover" from a lost star, it likely formed from the same cloud of gas that our sun and its possible companion did, just didn't absorb as much gas, hence why it is less massive. The original Nemesis theory did postulate that our companion star orbits at a great distance from the sun, perhaps a light year or more. This is sorta possible, although we haven't observed any binary systems in the millions of stars we've observed so far where the binaries were that far apart. Such binary systems probably aren't stable for billions of years, the secondary companion would be easy to knock off of the system by gravitational perturbations of passing stars. If we did have a companion, and it was in such a large orbit, it's likely it was just bumped off our system and continued on on its own. Its unlikely it has died by now, because small stars have very long lives. Red dwarf stars, for example, can live trillions of years, while the lifespan of our Sun is a relatively short 10-12 billion years.

a reply to: Gargoyle91

Jupiter is not the sun's twin. The sun is about 1000 times Jupiter's mass. Also, Jupiter doesn't posses enough mass to "ignite". It has only a fraction of the mass necessary to become a star.

a reply to: face23785

Guess I better stop listening to the Science channel.

a reply to: Gargoyle91

Whoever said that was probably speaking tongue-in-cheek. If you don't believe me though, Jupiter's mass compared to the sun can be found in its Wiki article and the minimum mass required for stellar fusion is in this article about brown dwarfs. Note that brown dwarves can undergo fusion, but they typically only fuse deuterium and then only for a short timespan during their life. For this reason, brown dwarves aren't considered true stars. Jupiter would have to be somewhere around 75 times more massive than it currently is to actually start fusing hydrogen in what's considered stellar fusion.

Edit: I should also note though that this is an ongoing field of study. The exact cutoff point between gas giant/brown dwarf/star isn't known for certain, for one reason because we've never actually been able to observe a body accumulate enough mass to make the transition. This event doesn't happen over a short enough timespan for us to have observed it yet.

originally posted by: Gargoyle91
a reply to: face23785

Guess I better stop listening to the Science channel.

Some of those talking heads (such as Michio Kaku) talk down to the audience so much in their attempt to simplify a concept that they end up oversimplifying it to a point that they give misinformation.

A case in point is this "Jupiter is a failed star" idea. It may be true in a very general way, but Jupiter was never close to being a star; it would need to be about 75-80 times more massive.

My advice to them would be to stop talking down to the audience and give the information on a post-high school level rather than assuming the audience can only comprehend at a 6th-grade level.

originally posted by: cassanovaondabeat
What if the sister star was perfectly in-line with the sun and as earth orbited, it would be perfect enough for us to not see it?

I had a much more informative and well-written response that I successfully erased with a single missed key-stroke

Short answer: Orbits mechanics don't allow it.
Under Kepler's Third Law, if a planet takes the same amount of time to orbit the Sun that the Earth does (which it has to, if it is to remain hidden on the far side of the Sun), then it has to be the same distance from the Sun as the Earth.
Another star in the inner solar system would completely disrupt the orbits of all the planets, and any "perfect" alignment would go right out the window.

originally posted by: face23785

originally posted by: Elementalist
Wasnt Jupiter a failed star? Maybe the Sun took most of the energy from the binary, out grew it's twin and its twin was cast aside into cooling which became a giant ball of gases?

We have so much to learn about solar mechanics and the functionalities of birthed solar systems..

It's commonly referred to as one, however it has nowhere near the mass actually necessary for a sustained stellar fusion process to take place. So in a sense, it is a smaller version of the kind of body that eventually becomes a star, but by almost 2 orders of magnitude. It would be more accurate to call Jupiter a "failed brown dwarf" which themselves are not even considered "real" stars because they don't have a sustained fusion process.

Hence the part i said the Alpha star absorbed most of the binary energy, therefore outgrowing Jupiter and casting it aside into cooling/shrinking?

Jupiter seems to fit the script of an unbirthed twin, one that wasnt able to heat up and combust as its Alpha twin took its energy to do so.

Just theorizing here.