University of California, Santa Cruz | 2014 Aug 31
The chemical uniformity of stars in the same cluster is the result of turbulent mixing in the clouds of gas where star formation occurs, according to a study by astrophysicists at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Their results, published August 31 in Nature, show that even stars that don't stay together in a cluster will share a chemical fingerprint with their siblings which can be used to trace them to the same birthplace.
"We can see that stars that are part of the same star cluster today are chemically identical, but we had no good reason to think that this would also be true of stars that were born together and then dispersed immediately rather than forming a long-lived cluster," said Mark Krumholz, professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz.
Our sun and its siblings, for example, probably went their own ways within a few million years after they were born, Krumholz said. The new study suggests that astronomers could potentially find the sun's long-lost siblings even if they are now on the opposite side of the galaxy. ...
Early turbulent mixing as the origin of chemical homogeneity in open star clusters - Yi Feng, Mark R. Krumholz
- Nature (online 31 Aug 2014) DOI: 10.1038/nature13662
arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:1408.6543 > 27 Aug 2014