
Sign up to save your podcasts
Or


Sun’s Original Twin: What happened to it? UC Berkeley astronomer Steven Stahler and Sarah Sadevoy of Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, have been studying how single stars form. Data collected in different surveys of the Perseus stellar nursery supports a model in which single stars seem to form first as binaries, then, depending on the distance between the stellar nuclei, they either stick together as binaries or break apart becoming single stars. The new study suggests this is how all single, low mass stars – sunlike stars – originally develop. So what happened to our star’s sibling? Because of the extreme distance between the two – 17x the distance between our star and the planet Neptune- the two nascent stars separated. One became our star while the other moved off to become one of the many other stars in this region of the Milky Way.
By WHYYSun’s Original Twin: What happened to it? UC Berkeley astronomer Steven Stahler and Sarah Sadevoy of Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, have been studying how single stars form. Data collected in different surveys of the Perseus stellar nursery supports a model in which single stars seem to form first as binaries, then, depending on the distance between the stellar nuclei, they either stick together as binaries or break apart becoming single stars. The new study suggests this is how all single, low mass stars – sunlike stars – originally develop. So what happened to our star’s sibling? Because of the extreme distance between the two – 17x the distance between our star and the planet Neptune- the two nascent stars separated. One became our star while the other moved off to become one of the many other stars in this region of the Milky Way.