Astronomers Believe the Sun Had an “Evil Twin”

The Sun, the center of our solar system, once had an “evil twin” according to top astronomers.  This “evil twin” was called Nemesis, who such astronomers say brought about the death of the dinosaurs.

Two distinguished astronomers from the University of Berkeley and the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory at Harvard University said that the Sun had a “sibling”, born 4.5 billion years ago.  The astronomer from Berkeley says that Nemesis “kicked an asteroid into Earth’s orbit that collided with our planet and exterminated the dinosaurs.”

But, Nemesis has never been found and the astronomers are unable to prove its actual existence.  But, they published a work suggesting that the formation of most starts occur in pairs—thus, the disappearance of the second star is not uncommon.

Sarah Sadavoy of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory proposes, “The idea that many stars form with a companion has been suggested before, but the question is: how many?  Based on our simple model, we say that nearly all stars form with a companion.”

Although this star may not have fried every being of existence on this planet long ago, its gravitational pull may have sent an asteroid on a collision course towards Earth.

Steven Stahler of UC Berkeley notes that, “We are saying, yes, there probably was a Nemesis, a long time ago.  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.”

If our Sun did have a sibling, it would have likely been 17 times further away from itself than Neptune, the farthest planet in our solar system—this would have thus been 46,500,000,000 miles.

To reach even greater feats, NASA has announced a mission to “touch the sun”, attempting to predict the coming of devastating solar storms.

Featured Image via Wikipedia