Alien life could be found in solar systems where stars have been pushed together, according to new research

Bethany Wootton, the lead author of this article, is now working as a physics outreach intern at the University of York. 

Planetary systems can be harsh environments in their early history. The young worlds orbit suns in stellar nurseries, clusters of stars where violent encounters are commonplace. None of this makes it easy for life to get going, but now astronomers at the University of Sheffield find one positive of this tumultuous period. A model developed by undergraduate student Bethany Wootton and Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Fellow Dr Richard Parker looks at how the habitable zone – the region around a star where the temperature allows liquid water to exist – changes around pairs of stars, so-called binary systems.

The two scientists discovered that an encounter with a passing third star may squeeze the binary pair together, expanding the habitable zone in the process. Their results appear in a new paper in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

The next steps for this research are to use more computer models to understand whether the negative processes a young star experiences are outweighed by the positives. Richard and his research team are currently exploring whether internal heating within the Earth happens because our young Sun was born close to a supernova explosion of a massive star; this explosion would be catastrophic for life on Earth today, but may provide the necessary conditions for life to have developed on Earth in the first place.

The article is covered by CNN, the Independent and a press release by the Royal Astronomical Society. 

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