The Case for an Early Solar Binary Companion
Amir Siraj, Abraham Loeb
We show that an equal-mass, temporary binary companion to the Sun in the solar birth cluster at a separation of ?103AU would have increased the likelihood of forming the observed population of outer Oort cloud objects and of capturing Planet Nine. In particular, the discovery of a captured origin for Planet Nine would favor our binary model by an order of magnitude relative to a lone stellar history. Our model predicts an overabundance of dwarf planets with similar orbits to Planet Nine, which would result from capture by the stellar binary, and can be discovered with LSST.
Comments: 4 pages, 2 figures; submitted to ApJL
Subjects: Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP); Solar and Stellar Astrophysics (astro-ph.SR)
Cite as: arXiv:2007.10339 [astro-ph.EP] (or arXiv:2007.10339v1 [astro-ph.EP] for this version)
Submission history
From: Amir Siraj
[v1] Mon, 20 Jul 2020 18:00:00 UTC (166 KB)
