Astronomical stuff one never thinks about
Or, at least, that I’ve never thought about before.
Stars, I hope we all know, are birthed from clusters in which gases are subjected to the necessary conditions (involving pressure and gravity) to coalesce into masses in which spontaneous fusion can occur. Our star, the Sun, was birthed in just such a way, many billions of years ago.
But of course, most clusters do not produce just one star; they tend to produce many, or so we suppose.
It would stand to reason, then, that the Sun has, effectively, “siblings” of sorts; there ought to exist other stars which were formed from the same cluster that birthed the Sun.
And now, it appears, we are going looking for these sister and brother stars:
Like other open clusters, the Sun’s birth cluster disintegrated with time. Most of its stars have long since drifted away and are mixed irretrievably into the swarms of the Milky Way — strung out during the approximately 27 orbits that they and the Sun have made around the galaxy since their origin long ago.
However, about 10 to 60 of the Sun’s nestmates (a few percent) should still remain closer than 300 light-years from us and are still traveling in parallel with us, according to Zwart. The European Space Agency’s upcoming Gaia astrometry satellite should be able to sort them out by their space motions. Their exact chemical abundances might then give them away for sure.
I’m not sure what we’d actually learn from this endeavour, but it’s one of those things that would still be interesting to see the results of. There’s a curiously touching familial instinct at work here, the application of the human tendency to seek out lost family to an avenue of research.
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