The sun was long believed by astronomers to be born with a twin called Nemesis. However, Nemesis wasn’t deemed as an identical twin of the sun. Yet, as the sun was aforementioned to have a twin since birth, researchers from the University of California at Berkeley discovered that other stars in the universe most likely has twins as well.
According to Phys Org, Nemesis was long theorized to be the Sun’s twin though it hasn’t been found as of now. The theory about Nemesis is that it was responsible for the dinosaur’s extinction on Earth as its gravity kicked an asteroid towards Earth. Hence, U.S. physicists conducted an experiment to find out whether other stars really do have twins as well.
The study conducted by the team was said to be based off a giant molecular cloud which was filled with newly born stars from Perseus, which is 600 light years away from Earth. The result was 19 binary star systems and 45 single stars discovered. After assessing the system, the stars were identified to be separated by more than 500 astronomical units or 46.5 billion miles apart.
"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 separations in the Perseus molecular cloud, and the only model that could reproduce the data was one in which all stars form initially as wide binaries. These systems then either shrink or break apart within a million years," study co-author and researcher from UC Berkeley, Steven Stahler explained.
Moreover, the reason why Nemesis wasn’t found was deemed that it escaped and already have mixed with the stars in a region of the Milky Way galaxy. Stahler also added that astronomers today believe that stars are born in an egg-shaped dense core. The study was published in arXiv server and was also acknowledged to be published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society as Astrobio reported.
Nonetheless, NASA Hubble researcher at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and another author of the study, Sarah Sadavoy then concluded that nearly all stars in the universe have a companion. However, she also believed that as the Perseus cloud model is considered as a typical low-mass star-forming region, their model needs to be checked in other clouds as well.
