Thanos Thanos:
DrCaleb DrCaleb:
There are a couple competing theories that there may be a large object orbiting the sun at a period of 26 million (earth) years per orbit, that has been responsible for the 26 million years between extinction events we see in fossil records. 'Nemesis' which might be a red dwarf star may padd through the Oort cloud and send comets into the inner solar system. It may be 1/10 th the mass of our sun, and burn so dimly we don't see light coming from it. Or it amy be a super Jupiter, at 5-8 times Jupiters' mass. We only recently found the planetoid 'Sedna' where we didn't think planetoids should be.
Is it possible for gas giants to form that far away from the solar centre though? To the best of my knowledge the extreme outer areas of the system is basically a garbage dump of comets and lesser asteroids. Without knowing more about the effect a star has on gas giant formation, in terms of gravity, radiation, and heat, it seems that there'd have to be something like a binary twin closer to us providing those three essentials for a giant to form at such a distance.
Billions of years ago, there was a really big red or blue giant star, right around where our solar system is right now. When this star finished burning it's hydrogen to form helium; lithium, berillium, boron . . .up to iron - once a star starts creating iron it's all over. Iron, as far as we know, can't be fused into anything else inside a star. Then the star goes supernova.
In the explosion, elements heavier than iron are formed, like lead, gold and unranium. As the millions of years pass, the matter that the star ejected slowly reform and become other objects, like asteroids and comets. Sometimes these bump into others, and the gravity they gain causes more asteriods and comets to clump together and form planets and moons and eventually you and I.
The early solar system is still represented by the oort cloud, nearly a light year from the sun. But the inner solar system could have held hundreds of Earth sized planets, but the larger gas giants gravity can wreak havok on the smaller planets.
Some models of the early solar system show Jupiter nearly where Earth is now, and as it settled back in the outer solar system, Saturn and Jupiter were 'aligned' every few hundred years, enough that theyr combined gravity could have flung some of these Earth sized plantes either out of the solar system, or into the Sun. They probabally did fling many planets into the cosmos.
So, a super Jupiter could also have been flung out into the oort cloud. We don't really even know if the oort cloud exists, let alone if a planet that size, or a star like Gliese 710 could form there. But most likely, if there is a gas giant out there, it formed in the inner system, and was flung out there.
Most stars have twin stars - something like 2/3 of stars are binary or more. So it's not out of the realm of possibilites that ours has a companion.
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