Chemical Tagging Used to Find the Sun’s Siblings
Paula Marie Navarra | | Sep 03, 2014 11:00 AM EDT |
Astronomers have used a chemical tag that served as a "DNA fingerprint" to find the Sun's long lost "siblings."
Mark Krumholz from the University of California said the same substance can be found in star clusters and serves as a star's DNA fingerprint or trace elements, to be exact.
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Researchers believe the fingerprint will be useful in discovering the sun's relatives because stellar families don't stay together.
They explained that stars are born in a star cluster but gradually drift apart and migrate to another galaxy.
Krumholz noted that stars that are part of the same star galaxy are chemically identical. This doesn't mean these stars were born together and immediately dispersed.
He said the problem is they don't know why stars tend to have the same chemicals.
To answer this question, researchers used the Hyades supercomputer to run a fluid dynamic simulation that tested two streams of interstellar gas that had collapsed.
Krumholz said when they added tracer dyes to the simulated streams, the results showed how gases mixed together.
He said that when the streams came together, they became turbulent and mixed together with the tracer dye.
Their findings show that stars born together have the same trace elements or DNA profile.
Krumholz said that stellar clouds form together into a very fast mixture that's very violent but at the same time very efficient.
Researchers ran other simulations showing there are interstellar clouds that don't turn into stars but still produced stars almost identical to each other. This led researchers to believe our Sun's parent cloud didn't produce too many stars.
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