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Our sun was born with a twin star, does that mean there is a version 2 of our solar system?

  • Writer: Shreya Rathi
    Shreya Rathi
  • Jun 30, 2022
  • 3 min read

A very new hypothesis suggests that every star is born with at least one sibling -- sometimes two, sometimes three, and sometimes even four!



In fact, more than four-fifths of the single point of light we see in the night sky comes from a pair of TWO orbiting stars. Even the famous North Star - popular amongst travelers for centuries - is not just one single star but rather a SERIES of THREE individual stars, read here to know more about this.


Similarly, our own sun in the middle of our solar system is no exception. About 4.7 billion years ago, our sun - was born in a “stellar nursery” - amidst tremendously VAST clouds of gases and dust, pushing and colliding with each other, forming CLUMPS and then gradually collapsing under their own weight, giving birth to the initial stages of the star.


After the formation of these stars, they start their outer space voyage, by getting flung into the galaxies. On this new and unknown journey, they are usually accompanied by at least ONE other companion - their twin. Most of the sun-like stars are seen with their binary twin.


BUT in the few years that we have been on Earth, we have NEVER heard about any neighbor of our sun. Rather, the closest star to us is 4.25 light-years away, and the edge of our solar system is only known to be 0.79 light-years away. So where is our mysterious twin sun and how do we know our sun is not one of the rare standalone exceptions?


Two reasons: the extinction of dinosaurs AND the shape of the boundary of our solar system.


Our solar system is known to have an “Oort cloud” as its neighbor, where the influence of our sun is FAINTLY observed. The Oort Cloud is a very mysterious and strange place. It is a disk wrapped around our solar system in all directions - majorly consisting of debris and small objects.

Its structure is very different from the flat-disk-like orientation of the planets surrounding the sun.


Every other sun-like star has a super Earth-like planet revolving around it. BUT AGAIN, in the few years, we have been here, we haven’t discovered any super-Earth close to us. So, the scientists LARGELY believe that another planet or planet 9’s existence is yet to be discovered in our solar system. BUT, there is no planet 9, so what does this mean?


Well, the most popular conclusion that scientists could come to was that maybe the Oort cloud was scattered from the disk that made the planet 9.


In this case, the sun with the help of its twin would have captured more such passing objects, which resulted in it becoming BIGGER and LARGER. And an interference of a THIRD star would have spun this TWIN away from our star - the sun.


All this can be very well proved by mathematical calculations - which makes these theories extremely plausible.


Another theory suggests that this twin star is in fact, a trouble-maker and a nemesis to the Sun. It is believed that after every 25 million years, this nemesis which is a red/ brown dwarf makes a pass closer to the sun, which could result in enhanced comet activity, because of its gravitational pull. Though it is a very interesting “what if”, it totally explains the 27-million-year cycle of extinctions on Earth - one such cycle caused the extinction of the dinosaurs.


However, whatever might be the role of the twin star in our sun’s life, we definitely know that there is a Sun 2.0, and we might never know if our Sun 2.0 might have an Earth 2.0!




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