The Sun Might Have Had a Twin

The Sun might have once had a long-lost twin.

The Sun is a unique, one-of-a-kind celestial object—but in recent years, scientists have found clues that there might’ve been twin Suns at one point. 

This isn’t necessarily a new theory, nor is it out of the ordinary, as experts have discovered binary stars before. According to NASA, “The variety seen in double-star systems is nearly as rich as the galaxy’s stellar population as a whole. These pairs can differ significantly in mass, with, say, a mid-sized yellow star like our Sun locked in an orbital embrace with a far smaller, cooler red dwarf.”

Since the Sun itself is a star, it makes sense that it possibly had a twin at some point—in which case, it broke away from its orbit by now. Otherwise, Earth would likely experience extreme temperatures. Who knows if our planet would’ve even been survivable?

“It is likely that any companion would now be lost among the sea of stars that we see in the night sky,” Sarah Sadavoy, an astrophysicist at Queen’s University in Canada, told BBC. 

Did the Sun Have a Twin at One Point?

But recent research further supports the previous existence of the Sun’s twin. In fact, after analyzing data from a radio survey of the Perseus molecular cloud, Sadavoy proposed the idea that all stars originally form as pairs—the Sun being no exception.

“You get little density spikes within those cocoons, and those are able to collapse and form multiple stars, which we call a fragmentation process,” she explained to BBC. “If they’re very far away [from each other], they might never interact. But if they’re much closer, gravity has a chance to keep them bound together.”

Whether it’s true or not, the thought of the Sun having some long-lost twin star is oddly heartwarming.