{"id":111585,"date":"2020-08-19T03:24:58","date_gmt":"2020-08-19T10:24:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2020\/08\/harvard-astronomers-propose-that-our-star-system-used-to-be-binary"},"modified":"2020-08-19T03:24:58","modified_gmt":"2020-08-19T10:24:58","slug":"harvard-astronomers-propose-that-our-star-system-used-to-be-binary","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2020\/08\/harvard-astronomers-propose-that-our-star-system-used-to-be-binary","title":{"rendered":"Harvard Astronomers Propose That Our Star System Used to Be Binary"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/harvard-astronomers-propose-that-our-star-system-used-to-be-binary.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>A team of Harvard astronomers have a wild new theory: the Sun used to have a companion star, making our solar system a binary one during its ancient history.<\/p>\n<p>The astronomers say the theory could explain the formation of the Oort cloud, a theoretical cloud of dust and smaller objects in the distant regions of our solar system that many believe was created out of the left overs from the early solar system.<\/p>\n<p>In a new preprint submitted last month to the preprint archive arXiv, the team suggests that the Sun used to have a long lost binary star companion. Such a system could explain how some objects were scattered to the far reaches of the solar system, sometimes even making it to neighboring systems and vice versa.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cPrevious models have had difficulty producing the expected ratio between scattered disk objects and outer Oort cloud objects,\u201d Amir Siraj, a Harvard undergraduate student involved in the research, said in a statement. \u201cThe binary capture model offers significant improvement and refinement, which is seemingly obvious in retrospect: most Sun-like stars are born with binary companions.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>A binary star system would be far more likely to capture the Oort cloud.<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p>The theory could explain the existence of Planet Nine.<\/p>\n<div class=\"more-link-wrapper\"> <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2020\/08\/harvard-astronomers-propose-that-our-star-system-used-to-be-binary\">Continue reading \u201cHarvard Astronomers Propose That Our Star System Used to Be Binary\u201d | &gt;<\/a><\/div><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A team of Harvard astronomers have a wild new theory: the Sun used to have a companion star, making our solar system a binary one during its ancient history. The astronomers say the theory could explain the formation of the Oort cloud, a theoretical cloud of dust and smaller objects in the distant regions of [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":580,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-111585","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111585","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/580"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=111585"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111585\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=111585"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=111585"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=111585"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}