Scientists have identified another star born from the same gas cloud as out sun some 4.5 billion years ago, but the discovery appears to be one of thousands of long lost siblings.
According to the Los Angeles Times, the newly discovered star has its key differences and is a bit bigger and hotter on the surface, but they have the same "chemical fingerprint." The international team of scientists concluded the two stars were born at the same time in the same gas cloud.
"Stars that were born in different clusters have different compositions," study lead author Ivan Ramirez, an astronomer at the University of Texas at Austin, told the LAT. "If a star has the exact same chemical composition as our sun, that establishes that they were born in the same place."
Ramirez and his associates' study will be published in the Astrophysical Journal June 1.
"It is almost certain that if there is another star like this one this close to us, we would have found it already," Ramirez said, "so the next siblings we find are going to be further away."
The sun is likely to have as many as 10,000 siblings like the one recently spotted. Over billions of years, these stars drifted far enough to be separated by massive amounts of space throughout the Milky Way Galaxy. At 110 light years away, the gas cloud, HD 162826, our son was born in is relatively close, Ramirez said.
The original purpose for the study was to make it easier for astronomers to survey close relatives of the sun, not to necessarily find one this close. He said "in five or 10 years," there will be a way for astronomers to observe "as many as a billion" stars past the immediate solar neighborhood.
"We want to know where we were born," Ramirez said in a news release. "If we can figure out in what part of the galaxy the sun formed, we can constrain conditions on the early solar system. That could help us understand why we are here."
