How fascinating! How thrilling!
I checked out HD 162826 with my software and was pleased to see that it is clearly bluer (and thus hotter) than the Sun, although not by all that much. Its B-V index is 0.541 ± 0.005, versus 0.656 ± 0.005 for the Sun. Also HD 162836 is brighter than the Sun, 2.253 ± 0.055 solar luminosities, according to my software. It is classified as a star of spectral class F8V. The distance to this star is 109 ± 1.3 light-years. That is of course utterly unimaginably far away, and yet, by galactic standards, it is right on our doorstep. We are lucky to have found a "solar brother" so close to our own solar system!
http://mcdonaldobservatory.org/news/releases/2014/05/08 wrote:
“The idea is that the Sun was born in a cluster with a thousand or a hundred thousand stars. This cluster, which formed more than 4.5 billion years ago, has since broken up,” he [
Austin astronomer Ivan Ramirez] says.
A cluster with perhaps a hundred thousand stars???
Wow!!
Please check out
this page, which contains some information (and some beautiful photos) of globular clusters M53 and NGC 5053. M53, a relatively rich cluster, is said to contain about 250,000 stars, whereas NGC 5053 is said to have
"a much lower density of stars compared to M53. Perhaps there are fewer than 100,000 stars in NGC 5053? Note that the Pleiades, according to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleiades#Composition, possibly only contains about a thousand stars (exluding members of binary stars, however). Our Sun might have been born in a bigger, richer cluster than the Pleiades! As you can hear I am duly impressed by the of our Sun's possibly splendidly brilliant and sparkling birthplace.
I note that HD 162826 is more massive than the Sun, but it has not yet begun to turn into a red giant. That's a relief, because it suggests that our own Sun's demise is a long way off. (Yes, I know, scientists have long predicted that fact, but it is nice to see it seemingly confirmed by the Sun's more massive "brother".)
But HD 162826 may not have any Jupiters. If not, it makes you wonder - or it makes
me wonder - why not. Perhaps it was too close to one of the brilliantly blue and ultraviolet massive stars in in our Sun's and HD 162826's birth cluster, so that its protoplanetary disk was blown away by the hot star's radiation. Or perhaps HD 162826 interacted too closely with another cluster member and and had its massive planets swept away.
In any case, this is just so fascinating, Margarita!
Ann
