Institute of Astrophysics and Space Sciences (IA) | University of Porto | 2018 Nov 16
By studying the stars which formed together with the Sun, Instituto de Astrofísica e Ciências do Espaço (IA) researchers hope to understand where in the galaxy and under which conditions the Sun was formed.
An international team, led by Instituto de Astrofísica e Ciências do Espaço (IA) researcher Vardan Adibekyan, used a novel method to detect solar siblings. ...
Solar siblings are the thousands of stars which formed in the same massive cluster as the Sun, about 4.6 billion years ago. As time went by, the stars in the cluster disbanded and scattered throughout our galaxy, making it very difficult to find them.
Vardan Adibekyan (IA & University of Porto) explains the importance of finding these stars: “Since there isn’t much information about the Sun’s past, studying these stars can help us understand where in the Galaxy and under which conditions the Sun was formed.”
He adds: “With the collaboration of Patrick de Laverny and Alejandra Recio-Blanco, from the Côte d'Azur observatory, we got a sample of 230 000 spectra from the AMBRE project.” AMBRE is a galactic archaeology project set up by ESO and the Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur, in order to determine the stellar atmospheric parameters for the archived spectra from ESO’s FEROS, HARPS, UVES and GIRAFFE spectrographs.
Next, the team used these very high quality spectral data from the AMBRE project together with very precise astrometric data retrieved from the second release of ESA’s GAIA mission, in order to: “make a selection of stars with chemical compositions which best match the Sun’s composition, followed by an estimate of these stars age and kinematic properties”, said Vardan Adibekyan.
Although only a single solar sibling was found in this work - HD 186302, it was a special one. This G3 type main sequence star is not only a solar sibling by both age and chemical composition, but it is also a solar twin. ...
The AMBRE Project: Searching for the Closest Solar Siblings ~ V. Adibekyan et al
- Astronomy & Astrophysics 619:A130 (Nov 2018) DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/201834285
arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:1810.01813 > 03 Oct 2018 (v1), 08 Oct 2018 (v2)