In the framework of the international project AMBRE, the purpose of which is to determine the parameters of stars, starting from their temperature and ending with the chemical composition, the astronomers found a copy of the Sun, which gives hope for the discovery in its orbit of an Earth analog.
Since we have little information about the past of our Sun, studying stars like it will help us understand where in the Milky Way and under what conditions it was born.
-Vardan Adibekyan, lead author of the study from the University of Porto (Portugal)
The brothers and sisters of the Sun are thousands of stars that formed with him in one massive cluster about 4.6 billion years ago. Over time, the stars, born in the neighborhood, dispersed and scattered throughout our galaxy, so their identification today is very problematic.
In search of relatives of the Sun, we took data from the AMBRE project, which contains 230,000 spectra obtained using the FEROS, HARPS 4, UVES and GIRAFFE instruments of the European Southern Observatory.
-Vardan Adibekyan
High-precision spectral data, coupled with information on the position and motion of stars from the ESA “Gaia” mission, made it possible to single out several candidates whose chemical composition, age and kinematics best fit with solar ones.
As a result, out of 17,000 stars, characterized by the AMBRA project, scientists first identified 55 applicants as analogues of the Sun, and then, rejecting those who do not have the chemical composition, left only 12. After specifying the age of stars, the number of “sisters” decreased threefold Finally, additional observations left only one candidate – the star HD186302, which turned out to be special. It is the star of the main sequence, it is about 4.5 billion years old, its composition and temperature correspond to the sun, and the radius and mass differ in the lower side by 4 and 2 percent, respectively.
Scientists note that such copies of the Sun may be good candidates for the search for extraterrestrial life, since there is a possibility that in the early stages of the formation of systems, life can be transferred between the planets inside a single star cluster.
Some theories suggest the existence of a small probability of the migration of life originated on Earth to the planets and exoplanets during the period of the late heavy bombardment. If we are lucky, and the sun sister that we discovered has a rocky world in the habitable zone, and it was infected with the seeds of life, then we can dream of finding the Earth 2.0 in the Sun orbit 2.0.
-Vardan Adibekyan
In the near future, astronomers plan to launch a campaign to search for exoplanets in the orbit of the HD186302 star using the HARPS and ESPRESSO spectrographs. The potential discovery of worlds in orbit of the copies of the Sun can provide important information about planets that have formed in the same environment.
Copy of the sun discovered
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