Maharashtra local body polls: The high court, while hearing a bunch of petitions challenging the SEC's decision, also directed that exit polls should not be announced till December 20. The Nagpur bench of the Bombay High Court on Tuesday directed the Maharashtra State Election Commission (SEC) to
Cosmic Scars Reveal The Sun Had Siblings & Their Breakup Was More Violent
Cosmic Scars Reveal The Sun Once Had Siblings, And Their Breakup Was More Violent Than We Thought
A new study suggests the Sun was born in a tightly packed cluster of sibling stars, but their early years were marked by chaotic gravitational battles that scarred the solar system's edges. By decoding the orbits of distant sednoids, scientists now believe the Sun escaped this dangerous nursery far sooner than previously imagined.
For decades, astronomers have believed that the Sun was not born alone but emerged from the same cloud of gas and dust as several stellar siblings. What has remained unclear is how long those stars stayed together before drifting apart across the Milky Way. A new study has now attempted to answer this cosmic mystery, and the clues lie in the scars left at the very edge of our solar system.
Scientists have long theorised that the Sun formed in a crowded stellar nursery, surrounded by many other newborn stars packed tightly in a shared cloud. While these stars began life together, their gravitational interactions were anything but peaceful.
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Whenever two stars passed too close, their powerful gravity could violently disrupt each other's early planetary systems. Objects at the outermost edges were the most vulnerable, many were tossed into extreme orbits or even ejected entirely. These ancient disturbances, researchers say, may still be visible today in the outskirts of our solar system.
To decode these ancient scars, a team led by Amir Siraj at Princeton University focused on nine distant bodies known as sednoids. These icy objects orbit more than 400 astronomical units from the Sun, yet surprisingly, their orbital planes are closely aligned with the planets.
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This neat alignment offered a vital clue: despite being born in a turbulent cluster, the Sun may not have endured excessive chaos as it separated from its stellar siblings.
The researchers ran simulations of countless stellar flybys, tracking how they would influence the sednoids' orbits. Assuming the Sun was surrounded by around 100 stars per cubic parsec, they deduced that it must have escaped the most hazardous region of its birth cluster within just 50 million years.
If true, this means the sednoids were thrown into their extreme orbits almost immediately — a cosmic fingerprint of the Sun's early environment.
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While the study offers compelling timelines for the Sun's departure from its birth cluster, one puzzle remains unresolved: why did the sednoids end up so far from the Sun in the first place?
Despite this lingering question, the research strengthens the idea that our solar system bears the marks of a dramatic stellar breakup — one that shaped its structure billions of years later.
Source: ZeeNews
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Maharashtra local body polls: The high court, while hearing a bunch of petitions challenging the SEC's decision, also directed that exit polls should not be announced till December 20. The Nagpur bench of the Bombay High Court on Tuesday directed the Maharashtra State Election Commission (SEC) to
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