Eliptical Orbits

[joewigon]

I just had a thought after reading about a dying star's ejection material gathering around it's companion star to make a planetary disk. My question:

Is it possible that in our solar system we had such a binary star which has long past blown up and or maybe turned into a singularity of some sort, whether it be black hole or nutron star, which can explain eliptical orbits? If so, would there normaly be some evidence of a singularity other than eliptical orbits? Is there some other mechanism at play?

[Ken G]

Welcome to the forum joewigon. I don't know if we can rule out that the Sun was ejected from a binary when its companion went supernova, but that companion is not here any more, and the Sun doesn't have an unusual motion as far as I know. More importantly, you can have elliptical orbits around a single star-- you don't need a companion to explain that. Probably the orbits are originally circular, but they perturb each other.

[Nowhere Man]

Things have to be just right to get a perfectly circular orbit. One little nudge means that it's not circular any more. After all, a circle is just a special case of an ellipse.

Fred