Merging Stars

Single-star systems like our solar system are not the usual case in the cosmos. More than half of all the stars in the universe are part of a binary system. And that's not all: Computer simulations by the Jülich scientist Christina Korntreff and her colleagues from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn suggest that, surprisingly, a large number of single-star systems in existence today originated from binary systems. During the first few million years of their existence such binary stars merged into a single celestial body.