Low-mass stars always born with a sibling: Many, like our sun, split up
Wednesday, June 14, 2017 - 09:52
in Astronomy & Space
Though astronomers have long known that many if not most stars are binaries, the question has always been, Were they born that way, or did one star capture another? Astronomers teamed up to systematically study very young stars inside their nest eggs, called dense cores, in the Perseus molecular cloud and concluded that all sunlike stars are born as wide binaries. Most subsequently split up, while the rest become tight binaries.