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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.
Just tell them about Uranus and they'll stay away.
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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.
Stuff that used to be outside a black hole.
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You also have that star forming clouds/regions can be quite large from the get go. The Orion Molecular Cloud Complex is hundreds of light years in diameter, so depending on the initial size of our formation cloud, there might have been no drift at all needed for their current positioning.
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Sure. But if this one has a watery planet our plants can probably grow there if life hasn't already evolved on it.
As far as we know we can't live without our plants.
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I make that about 27mph on average, so this star could move around town without getting a speeding ticket. Not least because it would obliterate the town and the whole planet.
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... on star HD 186302 an almost identical news report has been published.
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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.
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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?
Water is probably the most common molecule in the universe. Finding planets with water is easy. Finding one without any toxic chemical that plants can't stand is much harder.
Well, apart from the relative abundance of H2O vrs H2..... Finding planets with water is fairly easy, but finding planets with abundant LIQUID surface water, that seems to be quite a bit more difficult.
Earth is pretty unique among planets. Possibly one of a kind, perhaps not. But it's clear that rocky wet planets which are not too hot, not too cold and have the right amount of gravity, atmosphere etc, are not in every solar system.
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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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Maybe they should sign up for a social media account. It would allow them to get closer again.
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So we get the grammar police AND a "you are dumb" argument together?
My point is that planets like Earth are rare, at least as far as we can tell by observing our galactic neighborhood. There are specific characteristics which are unusual, including the amount of water, the size of our moon, the magnetic field strength, our distance to our star in relation to it's size, and even the size of the planet are all keys in developing and sustaining life as we know it.
How rare is this? We simply do not know for sure, but we can be pretty sure it's nowhere near 1 in 8 but many order of magnitudes less likely. 1 in a million? 1 in a trillion? Maybe even totally unique. The issue here is we cannot directly observe "earth like" planets much less tell if there is life there and this fact isn't changing anytime soon. Any "estimates" here are pure supposition at this point.
So, yes, earth is "pretty unique"... By which I mean, could possibly be unique, or possibly not. I know folks make claims both ways, I'm just not ready to make such a determination based on the evidence we currently have..
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seriously though,
closest star is Alpha Centauri.
Alpha Centauri isn't a star; it is a system comprising the stars Alpha Centauri A (Rigil Kentauris) and Alpha Centauri B (Toliman), with the dwarf Proxima Centauri orbiting the two at a great distance. And Proxima Centauri is currently the closest star.
I make that about 7000 miles/ year on average dispersion velocity. I've had cars that travel faster than that. Actually, I don't think I've had a car which didn't travel faster than that, on average, over a year.
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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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