Why should stars be borne in pairs?

Stars seem to be born in pairs! For a popular article see this. The research article "Embedded Binaries and Their Dense Cores" is here.

For instance, our nearest neighbor, Alpha Centauri, is a triplet system. Explanation for this have been sought for for a long time. Does star capture occur leading to binaries or triplets. Or does its reverse process in which binary splits up to become single stars occur? There has been even a search for a companion of Sun christened Nemesis.

The new assertion is based on radio survey of a giant molecular cloud filled with recently formed sunlike stars (with age less than 4 million years) in constellation Perseus, a star nursery located 600 ly from us in Milky Way. All singles and twins with separations above 15 AUs were counted.

The proposed mathematical model was able to explain the observations only if all sunlike stars are born as wide binaries. "Wide" means that the mutual distance is more than 500 AU, where AU is the distance of Earth from Sun. After the birth the systems would shrink or split t within time about million years. It was found that wide binaries were not only very young but also tended to be aligned along the long axes of an egg-shaped dense core. Older systems did not have this tendency. For instance, triplets could form as binary captures a single star.

The theory says nothing about why the stars should born as binaries and what could be the birth mechanism. Could TGD say anything interesting about the how the binaries are formed?

1. TGD based model for galaxies leads to the proposal that the region in which dark matter has constant density corresponds to a very knotted and possibly thickened cosmic string portion or closed very knotted string associated with long cosmic string. There would be an intersection of separate cosmic strings or self-intersection of single cosmic string giving rise to a galactic blackhole from which dark matter emerges and transforms to ordinary matter. Star formation would take place in this region 2-3 times larger than the optical region.
   
   
2. Could an analogous mechanism be at work in star formation? Suppose that there is cosmic string in galactic plane and it has two nearby non-intersecting portions roughly parallel to each other. Deform the other one slightly locally so that it forms intersections with another one. The minimal number of stable intersections is 2 and even number in the general case. Single intersection corresponding to mere touching is a topologically unstable situation. If the intersections give rise to dark blackholes generating later the stars would have explanation for why stars are formed as twin pairs.
   
   

This would also explain why the blackholes possibly detected by LIGO are so massive (there is still debate about this going on): they would have not yet produced ordinary stars, a process in which part of dark matter and dark energy of cosmic strings transforms to ordinary matter.

1. Suppose that these blackhole like objects are indeed intersections of two portions of cosmic string(s). The intersections have gravitational interaction and could move along the second cosmic string towards each other and eventually collide.
   
   
2. More concretely, one can imagine a straight horizontal starionary string A (at x-axis with y=0 in (x,y)-coordinates) and a folded string B with a shape of an inverted vertical parabola (y=-ax²+y₀(t), a>0, and moving downwards. In other words, y₀(t) decreases with time. The strings A and B have two nearby intersections x_+/-= +/- (y₀(t)/a)^1/2. Their distance decreases with time and eventually the intersection points fuse together at y₀(t)=0 and give rise to the fusion of two black-hole like entities to single one.
   
   

See the the chapter TGD and astrophysics or the article TGD view about universal galactic rotation curves for spiral galaxies.

For a summary of earlier postings see Latest progress in TGD.

Articles and other material related to TGD.