Interesting Leak: Another NASA Scientist Tells Us That ‘Somebody Else’ Is On The Moon

Our Solar System is an incredibly beautiful place. It’s a diverse place full of remarkable sights and natural wonders, whether it’s the pockmarked volcanic surface of Mercury, the dusty crimson plains of Mars, the beautiful rings of Saturn, or even the blues and viridians of our own world.

We’d be nowhere without the Sun, to be sure, and artist and illustrator Ron Miller’s series of truly stunning visualizations of our local star – as seen from each planet, including the poor demoted Pluto – serve to remind you of that. He’s spent over 40 years illustrating the dark realms of space, both near and far, and has created the most realistic depictions of the Sun as seen from these distant worlds as possible.

"I’ve taken care in not only making sure the Sun is depicted realistically, but also the surfaces of the planets and satellites as well," Miller told.

Despite the fact that Pluto is, at its most distant point, 7.5 billion kilometers (roughly 4.7 billion miles) away from Earth, the Sun still looks particularly bright. "While the Sun is smaller, it is still an immensely brilliant source of light," Miller added. "The light levels on the surfaces around you [on Pluto] would be dusk-like, but the sun itself would still be a very bright object – just a small one."

The brightness of the Sun is proportional to the square of the relative distance from it, according to physical laws. So, if you are now half as close to the Sun as you were before, the apparent brightness will be a quarter of what it was. (1/2)2 = 1/4, see?

This means that the brightness of the Sun decreases dramatically as you move away from it. The fact that it’s still bright by the time you get to Pluto is a remarkable testament to the sheer power of our nearest thermonuclear stellar furnace.A new model of star formation supports the theory that most, if not all, stars are born in a litter with at least one sibling.

Our own star at the center of the Solar System is most likely no exception, and some astronomers believe that the Sun’s estranged twin might be to blame for the dinosaurs’ extinction.

Do all stars form as binaries?

After analyzing data from a radio survey conducted on a dust cloud in the Perseus constellation, two researchers from UC Berkeley and the Harvard-Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory concluded back in 2017 that all Sun-like stars are most likely born with a companion.

"We ran a series of statistical models to see if we could account for the relative populations of young single stars and binaries of all separations in the Perseus molecular cloud, and the only model that could reproduce the data was one in which all stars form initially as wide binaries," said UC Berkeley astronomer Steven Stahler in June 2017.

For years, astronomers have wondered if our galaxy’s large number of binary and triple star systems are formed close to one another, or if they merge after they form.

The ‘born together’ hypothesis has been the most popular, and simulations developed in recent decades have revealed that almost all stars could be born as multiples that often spin away on their own.

Unfortunately, empirical evidence supporting these simulations has been limited, making this new work very exciting.

"Our work is a step forward in understanding both how binaries form and also the role that binaries play in early stellar evolution," said Stahler.

The researchers mapped radio waves leaking out of a dense cocoon of dust about 600 light-years away that contained a nursery of young stars as part of the VLA nascent disk and multiplicity survey (VANDAM for short).

The VANDAM survey allowed for a census of stars younger than half a million years old, known as Class 0 stars – "babies" in star terms – and stars a little older, between 500,000 and 1 million years old, known as Class 1.Using data on the shapes of the surrounding cloud of dust, the scientists discovered 45 lonely stars, 19 binary star systems, and five systems with more than two stars.

While their results predicted all stars were born as binaries, they amended their conclusion to take into account limitations in their model by saying most stars formed inside the dense cores of dust clouds are born with a partner.

"I think we have the strongest evidence to date for such an assertion," said Stahler at the time.

When the researchers examined the distances between the stars, they discovered that all binaries separated by 500 AU or more were Class 0 and aligned with the axis of the egg-shaped cloud that surrounded them.

Class 1 stars, on the other hand, tended to be closer together at around 200 AU and weren’t aligned with their ‘egg’s’ axis.

"We don’t yet know quite what it means, but it isn’t random and must say something about the way wide binaries form," said Sarah Sadavoy from the Harvard-Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory.

If most stars are born with a partner, where is ours?

A distance of 500 AU is approximately 0.008 light-years, or slightly less than 3 light-days. To put this in context, Neptune is approximately 30 AU away, the Voyager 1 probe is currently approximately 140 AU away, and the nearest known star, Proxima Centauri, is 268,770 AU away.

So, if the Sun has a twin, it’s almost certainly not visible in our neighborhood.

But there is an hypothesis that our Sun has a twin that likes to swing by every now and then, and stir things up.

This theoretical troublemaker, dubbed Nemesis, has been proposed as the cause of an apparent 27-million-year cycle of extinctions on Earth, including the one that wiped out the majority of the dinosaurs.

An astronomer from the University of California Berkeley named Richard Muller proposed 23 years ago that a red dwarf star 1.5 light-years away could periodically travel through the icy outer limits of our Solar System, stirring up material with its gravity, knocking a few more space boulders our way.Scientists have discovered an enormous planet nine times the mass of Jupiter at a remarkably early stage of formation – describing it as still in the womb – in a discovery that calls into question current theories about .

To detect and study the planet, a gas giant orbiting unusually far from its young host star, the researchers used the Subaru Telescope, which is located near the summit of an inactive Hawaiian volcano, and the Hubble Space Telescope, which is orbiting in space.

Gas giants, like our solar system’s largest planets Jupiter and Saturn, are composed primarily of hydrogen and helium, with swirling gases encircling a smaller solid core.

"We think it is still very early on in its ‘birthing’ process," said astrophysicist Thayne Currie of the Subaru Telescope and the NASA-Ames Research Center, lead author of the study published on Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy.
"Evidence suggests that this is the earliest stage of formation ever observed for a gas giant".

9.5 trillion km from Earth

It is embedded in an expansive disk of gas and dust that surrounds a star called AB Aurigae, which is located 508 light-years away from Earth.
This star got a fleeting moment of fame when its image appeared in a scene in the 2021 film ‘Don’t Look Up’
About 5,000 planets beyond our solar system, or exoplanets, have been identified. This one, known as AB Aur b, is one of the largest. It is getting close to the maximum size for classification as a planet rather than a brown dwarf, a body halfway between a planet and a star. It’s heated by gas and dust that falls into it.

Only one other star has been observed to have planets in the process of formation, known as protoplanets.

Almost all known exoplanets orbit their stars within the distance between our sun and its most distant planet, Neptune. But this planet orbits three times as far as Neptune from the sun and 93 times Earth’s distance from the sun.
Its birth appears to be following a different process than the standard planetary formation model.

‘Discovery challenges our understanding’

"The conventional thinking is that most – if not all – planets form by the slow accretion of solids onto a rocky core and that gas giants go through this phase before the solid core is massive enough to start accreting gas," said astronomer and study co-author Olivier Guyon of the Subaru Telescope and the University of Arizona.
In this scenario, protoplanets embedded in the disk surrounding a young star gradually evolve from dust to boulder-sized solid objects, and if this core reaches several times the mass of Earth, it will begin to accumulate gas from the disk.
"This process cannot form giant planets at a large orbital distance, so this discovery challenges our understanding of planet formation," Guyon said.
Instead, the researchers believe AB Aur b forms in a scenario in which the disk surrounding the star cools and gravity causes it to fragment into one or more massive clumps that form planets.
"There’s more than one way to cook an egg," Currie said. "And apparently there may be more than one way to form a Jupiter-like planet".
The star AB Aurigae is roughly 2.4 times the mass of our sun and nearly 60 times brighter. It is about 2 million years old – a baby by stellar standards – compared to our middle-aged sun, which is about 4.5 billion years old. Early in its life, the sun was also surrounded by a disk, which gave rise to Earth and the other planets.
"New astronomical observations continuously challenge our current theories, ultimately improving our understanding of the universe," Guyon said. "Planet formation is very complex and messy, with many surprises still ahead".