Shaun Saunders sent me an interesting story from Space.com.
In the story, new research is going on, into the chemical composition of stars could identify our Sun's long lost family. Present theories suggest that our Sun was born in an open cluster some 4.6 billion years ago, growing alongside its sibling stars. An open clusters are loosely gravitationally bound groups containing up to a few thousand individual stars. These clusters formed from the collapse of a giant molecular cloud of gas and can have ages up to 10 billion years. Each cluster has a unique chemical composition. The rresult of which are that the member stars of each cluster shared the same chemical composition. Such chemical homogeneity is expected if all the stars are formed together within the same parent gas cloud, and as such, it should be possible to trace back which stars belonged in the same group as SOL even though the loose knit cluster separated billions of years ago.
click here for more of the article at Space.com
In the story, new research is going on, into the chemical composition of stars could identify our Sun's long lost family. Present theories suggest that our Sun was born in an open cluster some 4.6 billion years ago, growing alongside its sibling stars. An open clusters are loosely gravitationally bound groups containing up to a few thousand individual stars. These clusters formed from the collapse of a giant molecular cloud of gas and can have ages up to 10 billion years. Each cluster has a unique chemical composition. The rresult of which are that the member stars of each cluster shared the same chemical composition. Such chemical homogeneity is expected if all the stars are formed together within the same parent gas cloud, and as such, it should be possible to trace back which stars belonged in the same group as SOL even though the loose knit cluster separated billions of years ago.
click here for more of the article at Space.com
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