For billions of years, the Sun has been a powerful source energy that powers the solar system. But our star may have had a rocky start. New research shows that the sun has migrated from the center The Milky Way and was in a more convenient location in the galaxy that allowed life to exist on Earth.
A team of researchers in Tokyo, Japan, has created a catalog of thousands of twin stars, stars that were born around the same time as the Sun and have similar characteristics to our central star. Analyzing this group of sun-like stars, they found evidence that our star joined the mass migration from the Milky Way’s core about 4-6 billion years ago. They detail their findings in two workplaces published Art Astronomy and astrophysics.
Migration
When the Sun was born 4.6 billion years ago, the star was located more than 10,000 light-years closer to the center of the Milky Way than it is today. Scientists know this based on the composition of solar elements heavier than hydrogen and helium, which is more consistent with the metals found in the inner regions of the galaxy.
But one piece of the puzzle was missing: how the sun would exit the Milky Way’s central band, a dense region that runs through the galaxy and acts as a barrier to moving stars.
To better understand the history of the Sun, the authors of these new papers, Daisuke Taniguti of Tokyo Metropolitan University and Takudi Tsujimoto of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, used data obtained by the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission. After filtering through observations of nearly two million stars, they found 6,594 stars similar to the Sun.
They looked at the size, temperature and composition of the solar twins to calculate their age, and noted that there were a number of stars that were between 4 and 6 billion years old (including the Sun). The discovery that the sun and these twins are of the same age and position at nearly the same distance from the center of the Milky Way suggests that the stars were part of a mass migration.
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The Sun is 26,000 to 28,000 light-years from the center of the Milky Way. The densely populated central region of the galaxy is much less hospitable to life, full very compact stars and turbulent cosmic events, much closer to the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A*.
If the sun had stayed close to the place where it was born, it is unlikely that life on Earth would have originated. Fortunately, our central star was in a quieter part of the galactic neighborhood where organisms could develop.
The new findings suggest that when the Milky Way’s central band of stars and gas formed, the process sped up star birth, pushing them toward different parts of the galaxy. Although the central bar has always been considered a barrier to the sun’s movement, this work suggests that this bar took its final form after the migration of this group of stars.
The discovery of our Sun’s twin stars could help scientists retrace the evolution of the Solar System and understand how conditions for life on Earth arose.
This article was translated from Gizmodo US by Kevin Handley. You can find the original version here.
