The Earth is the fortunate planet located right in the middle of a relatively narrow habitable zone of the Solar System, but it is not the luckiest in the universe. The most hospitable worlds may exist in the habitable zones around binary stars.
New research from the University of Copenhagen (Denmark) suggests that the most abundant life, with the greatest opportunities for growth and development, is found in the vast Goldilocks zone (the habitable zone) surrounding Sun-like stars, but not alone like our parent star, but rather in pairs.
Previously, scientists focused on Sun-like stars in the search for habitable exoplanets, but new models reveal that they are not the perfect choice.
A depiction of a star system centered around two Sun-like twin stars forming, based on data from NGC 1333-IRAS2A – (Image: ALMA/University of Copenhagen)
A pair of “Suns” can significantly increase the chance of habitability in that star system, as they greatly expand the habitable zone. When these star pairs are close together and orbit each other, they warm the planets formed around each star, creating a greater opportunity for liquid water to exist on a planet.
“The results are very exciting because the search for extraterrestrial life will be equipped with some extremely powerful new tools in the coming years. This enhances the importance of understanding how planets form around different types of stars, helping to accurately identify particularly interesting places to explore for life,” stated Professor Jes Kristian Jorgensen, the project leader, as reported by the Daily Mail.
This new discovery is based on observations from the ALMA telescope located in Chile, focusing on a young binary star system approximately 1,000 light-years away from Earth, named NGC 1333-IRAS2A, surrounded by a disk of gas and dust.
The research team input the data into computer simulations to rewind time, studying in detail how dust and gas accumulate in disks, the physical phenomena that have occurred, thus providing clear scenarios of the star system’s evolution in both the past and the future.
Notably, the common gravity created by the binary pair affects the surrounding disk in a way that causes a large amount of material to fall toward the stars, triggering explosive events that tear apart the gas and dust disk.
These explosions stimulate and disrupt wandering comets, causing them to eject materials—including many organic compounds, the precious building blocks of life—into the protoplanetary disk. This is crucial for the construction of potentially habitable planets in the future.
The research was recently published in the scientific journal Nature.
