An international team, led by Instituto de Astrofísica e Ciências do Espaço (IA) researcher Vardan Adibekyan, used a novel method to detect solar siblings. The article was published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
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.”
