The weird idea that Earth could be getting a second sun, at least temporarily, if Betelgeuse, one of the night sky's brightest stars, goes supernova, recalls a dream, many years ago, of climbing a ridge in the desert and seeing a dawn uncannily like this photo...
Others recall similiar dreams (many, like me, who had not seen Star Wars at the time), so are we in the realm of memes, of collective unconscious, of some hazy, shared memory from sometime, somewhere, of which we're all dimly aware but which we suppress in our daily living?
When I was a child
I caught a fleeting glimpse
Out of the corner of my eye
I turned to look but it was gone
I cannot put my finger on it now
The child is grown,
The dream is gone.
I have become comfortably numb.
Recently came the news that a planet orbiting two suns - the first confirmed alien world of its kind - has been found by Nasa's Kepler telescope. Truth stranger than fiction?
If most stars form in binary pairs, what about our Sun? A new paper reported by Big Think presents a model supporting the theory that the Sun may have started out as one member of a temporary binary system. There's a certain elegance to the idea — if it's true, this origin story could resolve some vexing solar-system puzzles, among them the genesis of the Oort Cloud, and the presence of massive captured objects like a Planet Nine. It's generally assumed that the Oort cloud is comprised of debris from the formation of the solar system and neighboring systems, stuff from other systems that we somehow captured. However, says paper co-author Amir Siraj of Harvard, "previous models have had difficulty producing the expected ratio between scattered disk objects and outer Oort cloud objects." As an answer to that, he says, "the binary capture model offers significant improvement and refinement, which is seemingly obvious in retrospect: most sun-like stars are born with binary companions."
Meanwhile, NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO, keeps an eye on our own nearest star 24/7.
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