The Sun Survived a Close Call With 2 Massive Stars 4.4 Million Years Ago, Data Shows

The Sun Survived a Close Call With 2 Massive Stars 4.4 Million Years Ago, Data Shows

The encounter left behind a trace in the clouds of gas and dust surrounding our solar system.

The Sun Survived a Close Call With 2 Massive Stars 4.4 Million Years Ago, Data Shows - WorldNL Magazine

In the early 1990s, the Hubble Space Telescope picked up something odd in the local clouds that surround our solar system. An unusually large number of electrons had been ripped apart from the atoms found in the clouds of gas and dust, a process known as ionization. Now, researchers have traced the ionization of the local interstellar cloud to a close encounter between the Sun and two hot, fast, and massive stars. In a new study published in The…