Our sun is a pretty unique star, and we should be grateful for it every single day. The only known planet that harbors intelligent life is revolving around our star. But the sun could even have once had a counterpart that hides closer to us than anyone would have expected.
A sphere of dark and icy debris located on the outskirts of the Solar System has triggered the curiosity of astronomers. This amount of matter doesn’t even match with scientific models of how the solar system formed itself. One explanation would be that the sphere is somehow a counterpart of our sun.
The Oort Cloud could be a witness
The Oort Cloud could contain a record of the lost star’s influence on our solar system. There’s evidence for big structures existing in the Oort cloud. Scientists have suspected that there may even be an unknown planet in that region. All the mass beyond Neptune triggers the curiosity of astronomers. Even the fact of the Oort cloud forming a sphere is unexpected, considering that all the planets and asteroids from the inner solar system have formed from a flat disk of dust and gas.
Avi Loeb, who’s the study co-author and a Harvard astrophysicist, declares for Live Science:
The question is: How did it come to exist?
The popular view is that maybe they were scattered from the disk that made the planets.
Our solar system formed itself around 4.5 billion years ago. Although during its very early stages, our Earth was like a vision of Hell due to the surface covered in molten lava, it slowly became what it is today: a beautiful blue planet that’s teeming with life: 8.7 million species, to be more precise. Going even further, there are 6.5 million species known on land and 2.2 million in the oceans.
