Notably one of the most intriguing messages we have received since Double Planet’s inception:
“You’ve got the name and I’ve got the theory behind it, so maybe together we can overturn conventional understanding of planet formation.
‘Double planets’ are the key to the unification of planets and stars, potentially overturning the two dominant theories of ‘core accretion’ and ‘gravitational instability’.
When protostars contract gravitationally, they bifurcate due to excess angular momentum, forming binary stars, but they may also spin off smaller gravitationally-bound masses that become protoplanets.
Then the protoplanets themselves bifurcate due to excess angular momentum, forming binary planets.
Here’s the kicker completely overlooked by astronomers. Binary planets contain vast quantities of energy and angular momentum in their binary orbits, allowing them to spiral out from their progenitor stars by transferring energy and angular momentum from their close-binary orbits to their heliocentric orbits.
But conservation of energy and angular momentum causes the close-binary planetary components to spiral in until they merge, forming solitary planets.
Most binary stars also spiral in and merge in luminous red novae (LRNe), such that former binary planets formed around binary stars all merge while still obscured by the protoplanetary accretion disk, forming solitary planets around solitary stars.
And the evidence that our Sun itself originally formed as a binary star itself are the short-lived radionuclides of our early solar system formed in nucleosynthesis of the stellar merger, 4567 million years ago.
You’ve got the audience and I’ve got the iconoclastic idea that could propel a paradigm shift in the understanding of solar system, perhaps unequaled since the Copernican Revolution of 1543, and I haven’t even touched on far-and-away the most dramatic consequence of binary dwarf planets, binary TNOs and binary comets, when they spiral in to merge and initiate aqueous differentiation, forming salt-water oceans at their cores. . . .” – David Carlson (2013)