University of Cambridge | 2017 Feb 20
[img3="Image showing family trees of stars in our galaxy, including the Sun.Astronomers are borrowing principles applied in biology and archaeology to build a family tree of the stars in the galaxy. By studying chemical signatures found in the stars, they are piecing together these evolutionary trees looking at how the stars formed and how they are connected to each other. The signatures act as a proxy for DNA sequences. It’s akin to chemical tagging of stars and forms the basis of a discipline astronomers refer to as Galactic archaeology.
Credit: Institute of Astronomy"]http://www.cam.ac.uk/sites/www.cam.ac.u ... raphic.jpg[/img3][hr][/hr]
It was Charles Darwin, who, in 1859 published his revolutionary theory that all life forms are descended from one common ancestor. This theory has informed evolutionary biology ever since but it was a chance encounter between an astronomer and an biologist over dinner at King’s College in Cambridge that got the astronomer thinking about how it could be applied to stars in the Milky Way. ...
The team picked twenty-two stars, including the Sun, to study. The chemical elements have been carefully measured from data coming from ground-based high-resolution spectra taken with large telescopes located in the north of Chile. Once the families were identified using the chemical DNA, their evolution was studied with the help of their ages and kinematical properties obtained from the space mission Hipparcos, the precursor of Gaia, the spacecraft orbiting Earth that was launched by the European Space Agency and is almost halfway through a 5-year project to map the sky. ...
Cosmic Phylogeny: Reconstructing the Chemical History of the Solar Neighbourhood with an Evolutionary Tree - Paula Jofre et al
- Monthly Notices of the RAS 467(1):1140 (May 2017) DOI: 10.1093/mnras/stx075
arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:1611.02575 > 08 Nov 2016 (v1), 02 Feb 2017 (v2)