We love a bit of crazy space news here at The Debrief, momentarily distracting us all from the fact that debt is getting worse, no one has any money and life is getting more expensive by the day.
And Scientists from Harvard University and University of California have found further proof that most stars are born with a ‘brother’, raising the possibility that there were once TWO SUNS in our solar system.
The Sun’s ‘evil twin’ - which was dubbed ‘Nemesis’ when astronomers began looking into the idea of a ‘companion star’ in the 1980s - might have also been to blame for the extinction of dinosaurs, throwing an asteroid into Earth’s orbit that led to the wipeout of the species.
Paleontologists from the University of Chicago previously thought that mass species extinctions, which roughly occur every 26 million years, were down to a mysterious extraterrestrial source, but this theory of a companion star now seems more likely.
The Nemesis idea had recently become less popular after next to no trace of the star had been discovered for decades. But a new mathematical model from University of California, Berkeley suggests that almost every star is born with a pal – meaning our beloved Sun probably would have had one too, and now it’s floating around in pieces in the Milky Way.
“We are saying, yes, there probably was a Nemesis, a long time ago. [But] these systems then either shrink or break apart within a million years,” said the study’s co-author Steven Stahler.
Amazing. Even the sun needs friends guys! Which is another story entirely…
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.