Scientists Are Looking for Our Sun's Long Lost Siblings

Scientists are analyzing star “DNA” in the search for our Sun’s long lost siblings.

Our sun has lost siblings, and now researchers are analyzing “star DNA” in the hopes of finding them. A special project known as the GALAH Survey and formed by a team of European and Australian researchers has been specially set up with this target.

Since their mission began, back in 2013, the scientists have analyzed about 340,000 stars. Now, they publicly released their data earlier this week, on Wednesday, April 18. The team is hoping to have examined around 1 million stars or more by the end of the project.

Stellar DNA Used to Detect Stellar Lost Siblings

GALAH is centered at the Australian Astronomical Observatory (AAO). There, its High Efficiency and Resolution Multi-Element Spectrograph (HERMES) creates a rainbow-like spectrum for each star. Black lines help reveal the chemical composition of each one in part.

According to Daniel Zucker, who works at the AAO and Macquarie University, each star has a unique band of lines, “like a fingerprint”. That being said, this “star DNA” will be similar for stars with a common origin.

All stars are formed in massive clusters containing thousands of others. Only afterwards do they spread throughout the Milky Way. However, through this sort of stellar “DNA” test, science can now identify which stars are related, including the lost siblings of our own Sun.

Fiber optics allows HERMES to analyze 360 stars at once, and each investigation takes about an hour. It took 280 nights to collect information on all of the stars studied so far.

Gayandhi De Silva, another AAO researcher from the University of Sydney, added that no other survey has been able to analyze stars as well as GALAH, which can detect more elements.

“This data will enable such discoveries as the original star clusters of the Galaxy, including the Sun’s birth cluster and solar siblings. There is no other dataset like this ever collected anywhere else in the world.”

GALAH’s data release comes shortly before April 25. At the time, Europa’s Gaia spacecraft is set to reveal the positions of 1.3 billion star. This should also release an even larger trove of stellar knowledge.

A paper with GALAH’s current results is available in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Image Source: Wikimedia

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When I was younger I used to spend almost all of my free time playing computer games. My mom and dad would go mental over this. “You’re never going to do anything with your life if you are going to play games all day” they used to say. What was even more unusual was the fact that I played more games than most of the guys in my friend group. Looking back, I have to admit that I probably played a bit too much, but I also learned a lot of great things. When I turned 20 I decided that it was high-time to make some money of my own, but the only jobs I could get were that of waitress or cashier. How exciting. After several excruciating months of serving tables I had a great idea: since I love gaming so much, why don’t I write about it? That’s when I started doing small writing projects on Elance. Eventually, I got an offer for a part-time job. During that time I learned all about content marketing strategies and how search engines work. I started writing about various topics such as technology, health and lifestyle and discovered that I was actually good at it. On November 24, 2014, I became part of the ArgyllFreePress team.