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Sun's evil twin - Nemesis, Analysis

In our gigantic universe, an infinite fabric of space and time, contain approximately a hundred billion galaxies as far as we have observed. Each galaxy has millions of stars and each star has a system.

By system, it means a region in a closed boundary which is under consideration and observation. There is an astonishing fact which mostly people have no idea about, many systems are binary star system. This means, that two stars are revolving each other having either the same mass and density or different, sometimes feeding each other when they are too close or have a large orbit for each other to complete a revolution.

image of Alpha Centauri
Alpha Centauri
For example, if you look at the closest system to our solar system in the interstellar through a telescope like Hubble, Alpha Centauri is a two star system having Alpha Centauri A and Alpha Centauri B. 

Now if we keep this part aside and look towards our own system, there were some extreme ages in the past. The extinction of dinosaurs, the showering of asteroids and meteors on earth, the formation of moon, shifting of continents et cetra are one of the craziest things to happen on earth, thousands and millions of years ago. But the problem is created when there raises a question of why that happened and why it stopped? Will it happen again? When will it happen again?

There are many hypotheses to give an appropriate answer to these questions as many scientists often tell his' or hers' own explanation, theory and analysis. But what could have happened really, literally!

Still image of NemesOne of the theories suggests that if most of the systems in our universe, particularly in our galaxy are the two star system, it could be possible that Sun might have a potential partner. We cannot say if it is possible but if we think theoretically, we might have an explanation perhaps an answer to the extreme ages of our earth, and will make our Sun’s system not so different from most of the other star systems.

We call our Sun’s partner, Nemesis and this theory is known as Nemesis Theory. Nemesis is a red dwarf or a brown dwarf postulated in 1984 to be orbiting Sun.

 In the very early stages of our solar system, there born two stars: Sun and Nemesis, much farther away. The year arrived when Nemesis came close to our Sun, approx 100±AU (where 1AU equals 150 million kilometers) close to the Sun, the whole stability of our solar system was disturbed and things became even harsher on earth. This is known as the period of mass extinction on earth.

Although Nemesis is hypothetically a red dwarf star, producing a little light and generating a little amount of heat and energy. But it still has a gravitational pull towards it, smaller than Sun’s but larger than all planets' combined. 

With itself, it disturbed the asteroid belt, swinging the asteroids away and making a ring of asteroids around itself. It threw the asteroid away towards the planets endangering the existing life present on earth, particularly dinosaurs. Many asteroids started moving towards earth and accelerated even greater due to the centripetal force of earth and due to the gravity of earth, of course.

Asteroids fell disturbing the earth producing energy much, much larger than the energy produced by an atomic or hydrogen bomb which killed all the dinosaurs. This was one of the first ages which worked out to kill life.

The Orbit of NemesisNemesis moved far away into the region beyond Oort cloud as claimed today, about 95,000AU from Sun.

Nemesis has an orbit of 26 million years which means, scary mass extinction will happen again and again and again until the death of our system. The whole discussion leads us towards giving Nemesis a title as the Sun’s Evil Twin.


Zain Ul Mustafa

Cakes, conspiracies, and computers are my daily pills.

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