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Nearby Star Is Sun's Long-Lost Sibling (syfy.com)
The Bad Astronomer writes: A nearby star, HD 186302, was almost certainly born from the same cloud of gas the Sun was 4.6 billion years ago. Astronomers have found it has an almost identical chemical composition as the Sun, is on a similar orbit around the Milky Way, and has the same age (within uncertainties). Interestingly, it's only 184 light years away, implying statistically many more such stars are waiting to be discovered.
Perhaps, but not necessarily. In 4.5 billion years since its formation, the Sun and the solar system have gone round the Galaxy many times. There has been plenty of time for the stars formed at the same time and place to drift apart.
About 19 times, if you want to call that "many". Your actual point remains valid though, 4.6 billion years is plenty of time to drift a couple hundred light years.
As opposed to ugly unique? Normally, "unique" does not require modifiers other than "nearly" - "nearly unique" might make sense. But not "pretty unique".
Also, are you using a sample size of one solar system for your "pretty unique" analysis? If you are, you might want to consider the evidence that Mars had liquid water (and may still, underground), and several moons have liquid water under the surface. Hardly unique, even in this solar system....
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About the same as 4 billion years ago, and 5 billion years ago - every year around 3 solar masses of interstellar medium were turned into stars, most of which were red dwarfs (and still are) though a couple of times a decade a star with a sun-like mass gets made. More rarely, larger stars would get formed.
TFA has no implication that anything particularly unusual was happening then. At this moment, the portion of the Milky Way visible to us (maybe one tenth of it), has several hundred open clusters of the form which they are suggesting the Sun and HD186302 once shared.
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