Sydney: 340,000 Stars' DNA Interrogated in Search for Sun's Lost Siblings

[bystander]

340,000 Stars' DNA Interrogated in Search for Sun's Lost Siblings
University of Sydney | 2018 Apr 18

A schematic of the HERMES instrument showing the light path of how star light from the telescope AAT is split into four different channels. (Credit: AAO)

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Chemical clues could reveal starry clusters before the Big Bang

An Australian-led group of astronomers working with European collaborators has revealed the “DNA” of more than 340,000 stars in the Milky Way, which should help them find the siblings of the Sun, now scattered across the sky.

This is a major announcement from an ambitious Galactic Archaeology survey, called GALAH, launched in late 2013 as part of a quest to uncover the formulation and evolution of galaxies. When complete, GALAH will investigate more than a million stars.

The GALAH survey used the HERMES spectrograph at the Australian Astronomical Observatory’s (AAO) 3.9-metre Anglo-Australian Telescope near Coonabarabran, NSW, to collect spectra for the 340,000 stars.

The GALAH Survey today makes its first major public data release. ...

Survey profiles 350,000 stars in search for Sun’s siblings
Australian National University | 2018 Apr 18

[rstevenson]

Nowhere in that article is there any support for the subtitle "Chemical clues could reveal starry clusters before the Big Bang". The only mention of the Big Bang in the article is exactly what you'd expect, saying "The ‘DNA’ collected traces the ancestry of stars, showing astronomers how the Universe went from having only hydrogen and helium - just after the Big Bang - to being filled today with all the elements we have here on Earth that are necessary for life." Can't see where that extraordinary sub-title comes from.

Rob

[neufer]

She reaches the stars

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"The Seven Ravens" is a German fairy tale collected by the Brothers Grimm.

<<A peasant has seven sons and no daughter. Finally a daughter is born, but is sickly. The father sends his sons to fetch water for her, in the German version to be baptized, in the Greek version to take water from a healing spring. In their haste, they drop the jug in the well. When they do not return, their father thinks that they have gone off to play and curses them and so they turn into ravens.

When the sister is grown, she sets out in search of her brothers. She attempts to get help first from the sun, which is too hot, then the moon, which craves human flesh, and then the morning star. The star helps her by giving her a chicken bone (in the German) or a bat's foot (in the Greek) and tells her she will need it to save her brothers. She finds them on the Glass Mountain. In the Greek version, she opens it with the bat's foot, in the German, she has lost the bone, and chops off a finger to use as a key. She goes into the mountain, where a dwarf tells her that her brothers will return. She takes some of their food and drink and leaves in the last cup a ring from home.

When her brothers return, she hides. They turn back into human form and ask who has been at their food. The youngest brother finds the ring, and hopes it is their sister, in which case they are saved. She emerges, and they return home.>>