#LONG LOST TWINS HOOK UP FULL#

'The beautiful thing is we can test it,' he said. Related: 5 reasons to care about asteroids Objects snagged at random from deep space would have formed a sphere around the sun like we see, not a disk.

It neatly explains not only the number of objects in the Oort cloud but its shape. There are a few nice things about this theory, Loeb said. By the time the sun and its twin drifted apart - their orbits likely broken by a close encounter with a third star - each would have been shrouded in an Oort cloud far thicker than what the sun and its twin would have captured on its own. Assuming the two stars were about the same size, and orbited each other at 1,000 times the distance between Earth and the sun (about 1.5% of a light-year), their collective gravity could have snagged bits of rock and ice from the interstellar medium. But on its own, the sun's gravity probably wasn't strong enough to pull so many of those objects into Oort orbits.Д«ut what if the sun and another star orbited around each other? Throw this binary companion into the mix, and the calculation changes.

#LONG LOST TWINS HOOK UP FULL#

That stellar nursery was probably full of rogue objects - interstellar comets and maybe heavier things like planets. The theory goes like this: Astronomers already agree that the sun, like most stars, likely formed in a tight cluster with many other stars in a galactic pocket of dust and gas. In this case, together with his frequent collaborator, Harvard undergraduate Amir Siraj, Loeb suggested that the sun may have worked together with a lost twin to capture passing objects from deep space. The 15 weirdest galaxies in our universe

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The 18 biggest unsolved mysteries in physics 'The popular view is that maybe they were scattered from the disk that made the planets.' 'The question is: How did it come to exist?' Loeb told Live Science. So does the fact that the Oort cloud forms a sphere, when all the planets and asteroids in the inner solar system seem to have formed from one flat disk of dust and gas. All that mass far beyond Neptune causes problems for astronomers, Loeb said. This Planet 9 would be up to 10 times heavier than Earth, though it has yet to be seen. For a few years now, scientists looking at the known objects beyond Neptune cluster have suggested that there may be an unknown planet out there tugging them into formation. There's some evidence for even bigger things in the Oort cloud. We can't see them directly, but there's plenty of evidence for them: the comets that plunge into the inner solar system from the Oort cloud at regular intervals. Probably about 100 billion individual objects, mostly chunks of rock and ice, reside in the cloud. But it still hosts far more stuff than it should, Loeb said. Fly through it in a spaceship and you're unlikely to encounter anything at all. Our Oort cloud is less crowded with large objects than is the inner solar system.

Long lost twins hook up