One of the biggest steps in modern astronomy was the discovery that the earth rotates around the sun. It seems silly we once thought that the earth was the center of the universe. The idea of earth participating in the solar system took a long time for humans to digest.
Keep this in mind.
Today, astrophysicists could be on the verge of a similar breakthrough. The binary star model is a hypothesis that our sun and solar system rotates around or with another central body.
Our sun may have a long lost sibling.
The discovery could change our view of the solar system forever. Not only the way we look at our sun, but our planet, and ourselves. Are we more than just a set of planets revolving around a star? Could we have been born with long lost brother or sister?
The evidence for a binary star system is compelling. To understand the mystery we need to look at the history of our solar system. With hindsight, it’s far easier to understand breakthroughs in scientific discovery.
Two reasons a binary star system is very important.
Would you want to know if you had a long lost sibling?
What effect would a binary star system have on our everyday life?
It could foster an entirely new age of scientific research.
Two reasons why a binary star system would change our everyday lives and scientific focus.
1) The role of the sun and UV light in the medical and health profession
Today the role of the sun is known to have a profound effect on human physiology. UV light affects circadian rhythms, mental health, vitamin D receptors, the thyroid, metabolism, and weight gain. These are all related to the cycles of our sun.
A binary star system would indicate our bodies have adapted to a system of multiple outside energy sources. Our healthcare profession could have been operating in the dark of these factors, which may introduce other cosmic cycles into medical research.
2) The leap year paradox and our flawed calendar system
A binary star system would mean that the calendar system we use across the globe would need to be overhauled.
Why?
It’s perhaps the most obvious piece of evidence that our sun may be in a binary system.
When using a calendar, you are looking at a mathematical estimation of the orbit of the sun, earth, and moon in space.
The Gregorian calendar system shows a lack of understanding of the cosmic influence on our daily life. Calendars are used tos track the earth’s rotation around the sun.
Months calculate the lunar cycle. Leap years, for example, are crudely inserted into the Gregorian calendar to stop the drift between solar and lunar years. There are actually 12.37 lunar months to a solar year, not twelve. That accounts for the loss of one day over 3200 thousand years.
The binary star system may fix our calendar system. It could also reveal that turns out ancient astronomy systems were aware of the binary partner and hence more accurate calendars.
When did Galileo discover the solar system?
Galileo did not discover the solar system.
In 1532 Copernicus wrote in his seminal work describing the earth as a planet orbiting the sun. He waited until his deathbed in 1543 to publish for fear of being banished by the Christian church.
It would be a century before Galileo would have the bravery to follow that conviction. In 1610 Galileo discovered moons orbiting Jupiter. By 1632 Galileo published “Dialogue Concerning Two Chief World Systems.” In it, he discussed a Copernican heliocentric system. Or as we know it today, a solar system.
Galileo was convicted of being “vehemently suspect of heresy.” The book was forbidden by the church and took nearly two centuries for it to be finally allowed to be printed in 1835.
What makes up the solar system?
Over the last decades, scientists learned much about our solar system. In 2003, a planet on the outer reaches of the solar system dubbed ‘Sedna’ was detected. Sedna is three times as far from the sun as Neptune which is why it took so long to find. In 2005, Eris which is the size of Pluto among a host of other outer dwarf planets were discovered.
The solar system model has a single rotation point which is our own sun. The sun is a yellow to white dwarf star and at the age of four billion years. That’s roughly in the middle of its life cycle. Stars are known to exist in many types and exist in clusters of stars called galaxies.
Does our solar system move?
What Galileo didn’t write, was that our solar system is in motion.
The solar system is a part of the Milky Way Galaxy, with its 200 – 400 billion stars. Galaxies come in many sizes. The Milky Way is big, but some galaxies, like our Andromeda Galaxy neighbor, are much, much larger.
As galaxies maintain a motion maintained from its formation. The Milky Way spins, kind of like a pinwheel, due to the energy of this formation.
Scientists have calculated the rate to be 270 kilometers per second (168 miles per second) which takes about 200 million years to complete one rotation of our own galaxy, according to the National Radio Astronomy Observatory.
The nature of the Milky Way indicates there would be many types of motions of the solar system within our own neighborhood of stars.
The solar system operates in a moving system.
How are binary stars formed?
The way stars and binary systems are formed within galaxies isn’t completely understood. One theory is that stars are formed in nebulas when gravity pulls gas to forms new stars. The size of the stars will matter and influence how their life cycle plays out.
For example, the evolution of a binary system with two massive stars, A and B, in which A is the most massive. Because of its greater mass, A will become a red giant star first.
As it expands in size, star A will dump a large fraction of its mass onto star B, changing the appearance of both stars. Star A soon uses up its remaining nuclear fuel, explodes as a supernova, and leaves behind a neutron star or black hole.
Astronomers have searched for a companion star to our sun. Evidence has stopped short at saying our sun is a binary system.
However, at the very least, it’s now known that it was one previously. Dubbed Nemesis, research out of Cornell University shows that the age of the binary system influences detectability. The reason binaries remain a mystery was because of the age of our star influences detectability.
How many stars are in a binary system?
When a star is formed they seem to form a wide binary motion. The different ways that binaries exist can predict the number of stars in a system. It may be two, three, four or more.
“We are saying, yes, there probably was a Nemesis, a long time ago,” study co-author Steven Stahler, a research astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley says.
The question remains as to whether that sibling or nemesis still exists.
Are most stars binary?
It’s hard to picture our own solar system as a binary star system. Clearly, one sun is visible in the day.
Binary star systems could be impossible to see with the naked eye from earth. So hard, it was once thought that binary star systems are unusual. During the 1900’s scientists considered binary stars a rarity. Now, most of the stars in our galaxy are known to be with binary partners.
The Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics estimates that 80% of stars are binary systems. For nearby Sun-like stars, more than 55 percent are confirmed to be in double, triple, or quadruple relationships. Alpha century system is the closest binary system (41 trillion kilometers in away).
Distant planet binary systems have been found to have two suns that would be visible through the day. That doesn’t necessarily mean binary systems have two visible suns.
How binary star systems work
Just because we cannot see it does not mean the star isn’t there. We now know that many stars cannot be observed. These include black holes, neutron stars, and many brown dwarfs.
Long cycle binary systems (those with orbit periods of thousands or tens of thousands of years) may be quite difficult to detect because of the very long observation period required.
5 signs our sun is a binary star
Without a directly observing binary partner, evidence for a binary system are indirect.
1) Our calendar system doesn’t quite work and the leap-year paradox.
The first line of evidence involves our calendar system. The Gregorian calendar begins the year at one arbitrary point every year. The leap-year paradox shows that we throw an extra day in because our years don’t exactly fit 352 days.
Lunar cycles and the movement of the Gregorian calendar show errors in this method.
A leap year is an intercalation, which is a fudging method to reduce errors. The calendar drifts one day every 3216 years. That’s an improvement of 1 day per 128 years of the Julian Calendar.
A binary system would mean we would need to calibrate our solar cycle (tropical year) around our binary partner.
Greek’s used the Sothic system, as did many ancient cultures that used longer cycles such as the Mayan calendar, the Great Year or Vedas.
These systems could have been measuring the motion of our sun around its binary partner and show why the Gregorian calendar doesn’t work today.
2) Current explanations of Precession of the Equinox don’t work
The precession of the equinox is the slow movement of the earth through the zodiac constellations. Current theories use the Lunisolar wobble of the earth due to the gravity of the sun and the moon. However, the calculations for applying this theory don’t work.
The equations to explain the Lunisolar model of precession uses the sun as a stationary object in space. Dynamical universe theory and further knowledge of the motion of the galaxy discounts this.
A binary star theory fixes all of these problems and is well outlined by the Binary Research Institute.
The cause of precession can be explained by the entire solar system moving to the background of stars. It includes the binary star partner. It explains why precession is speeding up (in a binary system the orbits get faster as the stars move closer) and using Kepler’s laws it allows the precession rate to be calculated more accurately than current techniques.
3) Nebular and angular momentum
The solar system was thought to be formed from a nebular system. From this moment, the spinning momentum or angular momentum should be conserved. That is the sun and planets are made and keep spinning according to the energy the original spin.
Angular momentum is proportional to mass, however, in the solar system, this isn’t the case. Scientists who analyzed the formation of the solar system showed the sun had 99.9% of the mass and only 1% of the angular momentum.
If a binary orbit at a motion of 24 000 years is added the angular momentum problem is solved.
4) The solar system has a sheer edge.
In 2001, researchers found that our solar system has a defined outer limit. A single sun system should have a wide dispersion of material with no definite end.
The Kuiper belt is a circumstellar disc in the outer solar system. Scientists found that the Kuiper belt seems to end. The conclusion was that there was a gravitational force of a yet undetected planet. However, it could be evidence that the solar system as a whole is in motion and supports a binary star system.
5) The shape of the solar system suggests it’s moving.
In 2007 Voyager 2 unexpectedly reached the edge of the heliosphere. It was a distance approximately 1.5 billion km less than the distance traveled by Voyager 1. It showed that the solar system is bullet-shaped in the direction of the interstellar magnetic field.
If the solar system were stationary, it would be logical it would be shaped like a sphere. Voyager 1 and 2 discovered further indications of its motion and overall bullet shape.
Conclusion
In 2018, we are faced with perhaps one of the biggest breakthroughs in scientific and general knowledge about our solar system.
If our sun has a binary star, our knowledge of our home and origins change forever.
Now it’s up to you. Do you think we have two suns?
Leave your thoughts in the comment section below.
Further reading
- https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/469/4/3881/3795556
- http://binaryresearchinstitute.com/bri/images/solarsystemmotion/Earth%20Orientation-Springer.pdf
- http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1086/319165/meta
- https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/a963/f5cdd63f72ba2fbe6f76cda23a221509aa33.pdf
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