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Nearby Star Is Sun's Long-Lost Sibling (syfy.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the blast-from-the-past dept.

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.

2 of 95 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Many stars are closer by sg_oneill · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I think in general evolution takes care of the toxic chemical part. Theres not a lot life can't adapt to, given time. Hell earth prior to life would have been toxic as hell to us. But given a bunch of billions of years, all the shitty stuff has been broken up and repurposed, and what can't be, adapted to and shuffled around.

    The more pertient issues I suspect are geography, radiation and heat, and a good old dose of random luck.

    --
    Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
  2. Sun logo by _merlin · · Score: 5, Insightful

    What the hell - now we get the Sun (as in the company that began as Stanford University Network) logo on stories about Sol? That's even worse than the DEC logo on stories about "digital" things. It isn't even that long ago that Sun was an independent company - surely the editors have memories longer than a decade?