Our Sun is part of a Binary Star System: Fascinating to see what ancient religions understood

[PsychoSarah]

Or.....read without preconception.... Without imposing ideas onto the text. Let it speak, without being decided you already know what it will say. And then like good poetry, it will begin to communicate on a subtle level, like poetry does.

Genesis only mentions 1 sun.

 

[Halbhh]

Genesis only mentions 1 sun.

We have digressed into another topic there, but if you wanted to see my own view about whether our sun is binary, read closer up the thread to the OP, which is to the effect of possible-but-unlikely-and-here's-why, etc.

 

[Radagast]

I had thought that was considered unlikely since astronomers have searched hard to find a nearby star to be a candidate, and haven't found one. Perhaps a brown dwarf or very small red dwarf? Even just 50 Jupiter masses would be plenty enough to cause havoc in the Kuiper belts if in the plane, sending comets sunward.

Indeed. The total and complete lack of evidence for the theory is a tiny bit of a problem.

These guys argue that any companion has a mass of at most 44 times Jupiter (0.042 times that of the Sun itself). More recent work basically rules out a companion altogether.

 

[Halbhh]

Indeed. The total and complete lack of evidence for the theory is a tiny bit of a problem.

These guys argue that any companion has a mass of at most 44 times Jupiter (0.042 times that of the Sun itself). More recent work basically rules out a companion altogether.

Good stuff. Thanks.

 

[Gxg (G²)]

I had thought that was considered unlikely since astronomers have searched hard to find a nearby star to be a candidate, and haven't found one. Perhaps a brown dwarf or very small red dwarf? Even just 50 Jupiter masses would be plenty enough to cause havoc in the Kuiper belts if in the plane, sending comets sunward..

Timing makes a lot of difference concerning the issue, as more recent studies (for those saying there's no evidence of a binary sun TODAY) have shown that our sun did have one at its beginning. This has been noted in other places as well, despite claims of their being no evidence. This is from June of this year:

• Sun Likely Has a Long-Lost Twin - Space.com
• 
  
  A radio image of a triple-star system forming within a dusty disk in the Perseus molecular cloud obtained by the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array in Chile.
  Credit: Bill Saxton, ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO), NRAO/AUI/NSF
  Nemesis is apparently real, even if its bad reputation is undeserved.
  
  For decades, some scientists have speculated that the sun has a companion whose gravitational tug periodically jostles comets out of their normal orbits, sending them careening toward Earth. The resulting impacts have caused mass extinctions, the thinking goes, which explains the putative star's nickname: Nemesis.
  
  Now, a new study reports that almost all sun-like stars are likely born with companions, bolstering the case for the existence of Nemesis. [Solar Quiz: How Well Do You Know the Sun?]
  
  "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, said in a statement. But the new results don't paint Nemesis as a murderer: The sibling star probably broke free of the sun and melted into the Milky Way galaxy's stellar population billions of years ago, study team members said.

 

[Halbhh]

Timing makes a lot of difference concerning the issue, as more recent studies (for those saying there's no evidence of a binary sun TODAY) have shown that our sun did have one at its beginning. This has been noted in other places as well, despite claims of their being no evidence. This is from June of this year:

• Sun Likely Has a Long-Lost Twin - Space.com
• 
  
  A radio image of a triple-star system forming within a dusty disk in the Perseus molecular cloud obtained by the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array in Chile.
  Credit: Bill Saxton, ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO), NRAO/AUI/NSF
  Nemesis is apparently real, even if its bad reputation is undeserved.
  
  For decades, some scientists have speculated that the sun has a companion whose gravitational tug periodically jostles comets out of their normal orbits, sending them careening toward Earth. The resulting impacts have caused mass extinctions, the thinking goes, which explains the putative star's nickname: Nemesis.
  
  Now, a new study reports that almost all sun-like stars are likely born with companions, bolstering the case for the existence of Nemesis. [Solar Quiz: How Well Do You Know the Sun?]
  
  "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, said in a statement. But the new results don't paint Nemesis as a murderer: The sibling star probably broke free of the sun and melted into the Milky Way galaxy's stellar population billions of years ago, study team members said.

Right. I'd forgotten that. There are constantly new hypotheses in astrophysics, hundreds per year, and sometimes they even get found again later, the current researchers being unaware it had been done before. The thing about red dwarf stars turning out to be very bad hosts for life as we know it is a good example. This was already written on before the recent excitement about the 7 "Earth like" planets near the red dwarf Trappist 1, and then after a few months new sets of researchers reached the same conclusions I had read already and this time still remembered. It was amusing, and not a bad thing, really. One result even showed it was not only unlikely for an Earth like planet near Trappist 1, but drastically unlikely.

 

[Gxg (G²)]

but if you wanted to see my own view about whether our sun is binary, read closer up the thread to the OP, which is to the effect of possible-but-unlikely-and-here's-why, etc.

May wish to consider this since this goes into more detail on the origins of our solar system, from Did our sun have a twin? | Space | EarthSky :

Steven Stahler, a UC Berkeley research astronomer, and Sarah Sadavoy, a NASA Hubble fellow at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, have been collaborating on their ideas about star formation – using observations of the Perseus molecular cloud as a basis for comparison – and now, according to Staher:

We are saying, yes, there probably was a Nemesis, a long time ago.

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. These systems then either shrink or break apart within a million years.

Molecular clouds appear dark in our sky because they are opaque to starlight; they hid the stars behind them. This molecular clouds is labeled Barnard 68. Like the Perseus molecular cloud, it can only be probed by radio waves. Image via FORS Team/ 8.2-meter VLT Antu/ ESO/ a href=”http://news.berkeley.edu/2017/06/13/new-evidence-that-all-stars-are-born-in-pairs/” target=”_blank”>UC Berkeley.​

In this study, “wide” means that the two stars are separated by more than 500 astronomical units (AU), where one AU is the average distance between our sun and Earth (93 million miles,or 150 million km). They said a wide binary companion to our sun would have been 17 times farther from our sun than its most distant major planet, Neptune.

Based on their model, the sun’s young sibling – the star they’re called Nemesis – no longer resides in our solar system. Their statement explained it:

… most likely escaped and mixed with all the other stars in our region of the Milky Way galaxy, never to be seen again.

Stahler and Sadavoy posted their findings in April on the arXiv server. Their paper has been accepted for publication in the peer-reviewed Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

A radio image of a triple star system forming within a dusty disk in the Perseus molecular cloud. Image via the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile/ Bill Saxton/ UC Berkeley.​

First author Sarah Sadavoy added:

The idea that many stars form with a companion has been suggested before, but the question is: how many? Based on our simple model, we say that nearly all stars form with a companion. The Perseus cloud is generally considered a typical low-mass star-forming region, but our model needs to be checked in other clouds.​

The idea that all stars are born in a litter has implications beyond star formation, including the very origins of galaxies, Stahler said.

Read more about this study from UC Berkeley


This infrared image from the Hubble Space Telescope contains a bright, fan-shaped object (lower right quadrant) thought to be a binary star that emits light pulses as the two stars interact. The primitive binary system is located in the IC 348 region of the Perseus molecular cloud and was included in the study by the Berkeley/Harvard team. (Image: NASA/ ESA/ J. Muzerolle, STScI/ UC Berkeley.)
​

 

[Gxg (G²)]

Right. I'd forgotten that. There are constantly new hypotheses in astrophysics, hundreds per year, and sometimes they even get found again later, the current researchers being unaware it had been done before. The thing about red dwarf stars turning out to be very bad hosts for life as we know it is a good example. This was already written on before the recent excitement about the 7 "Earth like" planets near the red dwarf Trappist 1, and then after a few months new sets of researchers reached the same conclusions I had read already and this time still remembered. It was amusing, and not a bad thing, really. One result even showed it was not only unlikely for an Earth like planet near Trappist 1, but drastically unlikely.

Very true

 

[Radrook]

Interesting when reading on Genesis and seeing that even with God making the moon and the Sun, the other aspects of how the moon operates are not necessarily spelled out in Genesis.

A lot of folks were thinking this in-depth when considering how the recent Solar Eclipse came about

​

Day and night for the Earth is understandable. But why all the sunrises ad sunsets on worlds where nobody is there to see them?

 

[JackRT]

Day and night for the Earth is understandable. But why all the sunrises ad sunsets on worlds where nobody is there to see them?

Wasted! Totally wasted!

 

[Radrook]

Wasted! Totally wasted!

The question is why?

 

[timewerx]

The real question for a theist is why would a creator place such a disruptive star in that sensitive vicinity to our Earth.

Extinction events/periodic massive volcanic activity seem to hint at the possibility.

Massive volcanism has been linked to large impacts by asteroids or comets as obviously, the massive kinetic energy of a large impact has to go somewhere and this kinetic energy is always converted into heat that is transferred to the atmosphere, the ground, and finally, to the Earth's interior.

This makes large impacts twice as deadly, from the intial destruction and eventually, causing massive geological activity worldwide from large earthquakes, accelerated continental drift, and creation and explosion of supervolcanoes.

 

[Halbhh]

Extinction events/periodic massive volcanic activity seem to hint at the possibility.

Massive volcanism has been linked to large impacts by asteroids or comets as obviously, the massive kinetic energy of a large impact has to go somewhere and this kinetic energy is always converted into heat that is transferred to the atmosphere, the ground, and finally, to the Earth's interior.

This makes large impacts twice as deadly, from the intial destruction and eventually, causing massive geological activity worldwide from large earthquakes, accelerated continental drift, and creation and explosion of supervolcanoes.

Right, impacts would increase volcanic activity. It's interesting that after the big impact 66 million years ago, the volcanoes finished off most dinosaurs.

And that, their conversion into compost, is what allowed the rise of mammals, and cleared and prepared the way for us!

A perfect impact of just the right size....not too little, and not too big.

Too little, and dinos survive and compete with mammals.
Utahraptors, more dangerous than velociraptors, hunted in packs likely, and would be worse than wolves by far.
Utahraptors

Too big, and mammals die out too.

Instead, it was just exactly, perfectly right.

Selected it would seem.

 

[Radrook]

Extinction events/periodic massive volcanic activity seem to hint at the possibility.

Massive volcanism has been linked to large impacts by asteroids or comets as obviously, the massive kinetic energy of a large impact has to go somewhere and this kinetic energy is always converted into heat that is transferred to the atmosphere, the ground, and finally, to the Earth's interior.

This makes large impacts twice as deadly, from the intial destruction and eventually, causing massive geological activity worldwide from large earthquakes, accelerated continental drift, and creation and explosion of supervolcanoes.

That sounds like a rather clumsy, roundabout, inefficient way to go about things and doesn't harmonize at all with the calm pronouncements followed by creations described in Genesis. It also comes across as callously ignoring the sufferings that such events caused his creatures and the worry that it engenders in human minds. Not at all reassuring behavior but one that seems more likely motivated with the aim to intimidate and force obedience via fostering a servile fear.

 

[Radrook]

Some suggest that he created all those other billions of suns in order to cause humans to view him with awe.

 

[Halbhh]

That sounds like a rather clumsy, roundabout, inefficient way to go about things and doesn't harmonize at all with the calm pronouncements followed by creations described in Genesis. It also comes across as callously ignoring the sufferings that such events caused his creatures and the worry that it engenders in human minds. Not at all reassuring behavior but one that seems more likely motivated with the aim to intimidate and force obedience via fostering a servile fear.

Indeed it does not harmonize with some loudly repeated viewpoints we've all heard like the young Earth stuff.

But great mass extinctions leading to rapid evolution or change in the biosphere harmonizes very, very well with how the text looks to me, having read through the Bible fully, and not partially.

If you want to learn how it looks to me, consider how we learn for one thing that communication from God often happens from visions (e.g. 1 Sam ch 3 v 1 is that when visions are rare then communication from God is rare). And as soon as I start reading Genesis chapter 1 I notice poetic wording (beginning in verse 2). I notice possibly stylized or symbolic wording soon also (or a writer struggling to put words for what he saw with limited vocabulary and without own modern understandings). I notice wordings that are much like a vision, or possibly a stylized vision.

That the writer did not understand all he saw in the vision is merely normal, we learn, in the Bible. Visions are often poorly understood by the person seeing them. In this one we have 6 'days', scenes, as if from a camera on the surface of the Earth. Day and night begin on day 1, and that cycle implies the sun evidently shining (we can deduce, leading to the diurnal cycle), but also not yet visible due to constant overcast clouds (just like computer simulations show early Earth would have for on the order of a billion or more years, and then still a lot of cloudiness for a long time more, so that perfectly clear days were still far in the future at that point). etc. We aren't told if there is separation in time between these scenes, because that's not the point. But now we can deduce there was, evidently. See, the point of the vision -- those snapshot pictures of individual days, or perhaps instead the stylized representation (either) -- isn't about what happened in the sense of mere geology or evolution. Not small detail. Stuff like that isn't the goal of the scripture. The point isn't merely a lengthy video or a science style summary. The goal of the vision is different than those.

It's poetic because the real point is to allow you to get into an inspired state of mind, if you have faith.

 

[Wakalix]

Right, impacts would increase volcanic activity. It's interesting that after the big impact 66 million years ago, the volcanoes finished off most dinosaurs.

And that, their conversion into compost, is what allowed the rise of mammals, and cleared and prepared the way for us!

A perfect impact of just the right size....not too little, and not too big.

Too little, and dinos survive and compete with mammals.
Utahraptors, more dangerous than velociraptors, hunted in packs likely, and would be worse than wolves by far.
Utahraptors

Too big, and mammals die out too.

Instead, it was just exactly, perfectly right.

Selected it would seem.

Anthropically selected, even.

 

[Halbhh]

Anthropically selected, even.

Just so. Here we are. The impacts neither prove nor disprove anything about God, which is what I'm pointing at, from earlier in the discussion, where someone suggested the impacts point to the Bible being wrong. I'm merely pointing out how that conclusion does not follow, see? (That idea they contradict the Bible, such as God being a bad shepherd of us for instance, isn't correct, in that the text is fully compatible with major extinction impacts; e.g. -- it's just as reasonable to see the impacts as merely His preparing our home world for us.)

 

[Wakalix]

Just so. Here we are. The impacts neither prove nor disprove anything about God, which is what I'm pointing at, from earlier in the discussion, where someone suggested the impacts point to the Bible being wrong. I'm merely pointing out how that conclusion does not follow, see? (That idea they contradict the Bible, such as God being a bad shepherd of us for instance, isn't correct, in that the text is fully compatible with major extinction impacts; e.g. -- it's just as reasonable to see the impacts as merely His preparing our home world for us.)

But if God is all-powerful, could he not create a world that was already prepared for us and did not need to be prepared through devastation and destruction?

 

[JackRT]

But if God is all-powerful, could he not create a world that was already prepared for us and did not need to be prepared through devastation and destruction?

An all powerful God could do that but why make it look old? As far as I am concerned the first evidence of God's creation is found in the stones and the bones and the stars and that record was written millions even billions of years ago. It is only in the past few centuries that we have learned to read that record.