Image credit: B Saxton, ALMA.
The reason why some stars are born in pairs while others are born singly has long puzzled astronomers. But a new study suggests that no special conditions are required: all stars start their lives as part of a binary pair. The result has implications not only in the field of star evolution but also for studies of binary neutron-star and binary black-hole formation. It also suggests that our own Sun was born together with a companion that has since disappeared.
Stars are born in dense molecular clouds measuring light-years across, within which denser regions can collapse under their own gravity to form high-density cores opaque to optical radiation, which appear as dark patches. When the densities reach the level where hydrogen fusion begins, the cores can form stars. Although young stars already emit radiation before the onset of the hydrogen-burning phase, it is absorbed in the dense clouds that surround them, making star-forming regions difficult to study. Yet, since clouds that absorb optical and infrared radiation re-emit it at much longer wavelengths, it is possible to probe them using radio telescopes.
Sarah Sadavoy of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg and Steven Stahler of the University of California at Berkeley used data from the Very Large Array (VLA) radio telescopes in New Mexico, together with micrometre-wavelength data from the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) in Hawaii, to study the dense gas clumps and the young stars forming in them in the Perseus cluster – a star-forming region about 600 light-years away. Data from the JCMT show the location of dense cores in the gas, while the VLA provides the location of the young stars within them.
Studying the multiplicity as well as the location of the young stars inside the dense regions, the researchers found a total of 19 binary systems, 45 single-star systems and five systems with a higher multiplicity. Focusing on the binary pairs, they observed that the youngest binaries typically have a large separation of 500 astronomical units (500 times the Sun–Earth distance). Furthermore, the young stars were aligned along the long axis of the elongated cloud. Older binary systems, with an age between 500,000 and one million years, were found typically to be closer together and separated around a random axis.
Subsequent to cataloguing all the young stars, the team compared the observed star multiplicity and the features seen in the binary pairs to simulations of stars being formed either as single or binary systems. The only way the model could reproduce the data was if its starting conditions contained no single stars but only stars that started out as part of wide binaries, implying that all stars are formed as part of a binary system. After formation, the stars either move closer to one another into a close binary system or move away from each other. The latter option is likely to be what happened in the case of the Sun, its companion having drifted away long ago.
If indeed all stars are formed in pairs, it would have big implications for models of stellar birth rates in molecular clouds as well as for the formation of binary systems of compact objects. The studied nearby Perseus cluster could, however, just be a special case, and further studies of other star-forming regions are therefore required to know if the same conditions exist elsewhere in the universe.
