Nearby Star Is Sun's Long-Lost Sibling (syfy.com) 95
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.
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Degenerate matter, not unlike your typical /. poster.
CAPTCHA: aberrant
Re:What's inside a black hole? (Score:5, Funny)
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You win the Internet for today, my good sir.
Please take care of it and don't drop it! The elders would not be amused.
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Really? I thought it was plates.
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That's a stupid question. - "Starfleet admiral" Patrick
Many stars are closer (Score:2)
Re:Many stars are closer (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Many stars are closer (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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More specifically, we're about 26,490 ly from the center of the milky way, so over (I calculate) 20 orbits we've traveled ~3.3 million ly in 4.6 billion years around the center of the Milky Way. So, a shift of 186 ly is ~0.006% over 4.6 billion years*. As the article states, though, with an average distribution of ~1,000 stars on a 166,441 ly orbit you'd expect 166 ly between stars (and hence a shift of ~50% at the extreme). It's little wonder factoring in the many other gas clouds form star clusters of
Re:Many stars are closer (Score:5, Informative)
TL;DR
Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space. - Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
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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.
Sort of? This is **REALLY** beyond my pay grade. But I think the situation may be that small differences in the velocity vectors of stars formed close together cause the stars to diverge as the stars move around the galactic center until their mutual distance reaches a maximum at a point (sort of) opposite their starting points relative to the gal
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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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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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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.
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+1 Informative, -1 Flamebait.
Net: 0 mod points for you.
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NEXT! - The Slashdot Nazi /Seinfeld
Re:Many stars are closer (Score:5, 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.
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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.
Re:Many stars are closer (Score:5, Informative)
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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So what you're saying is that Earth's properties are a pretty big coincidence...
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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 s
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Besides all you mention, the fact that the Earth seems to have been quite stable over 4.5 billion years is likely a rarity. Based on our sample size of one, it seems to take billions of years for complex life to evolve and the Earth has remained mostly at temperatures etc that allow liquid water on the surface, even as the Sun has increased its output by 25% or so. The Sun has also stayed in the habitable zone of the galaxy for the same time.
The rare Earth hypothesis, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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These are
??
There is a problem of coverage here. Out of the relatively small areas of the sky surveyed, to a quite shallow depth of survey, with major biases towards non-Sun-like stellar systems in the search methods, we have not found an Earth-a-like.
But we have found a number of somewhat similar systems.
And there are literally billions of un-surve
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You are making the same argument that creationists make when they claim that the anthropic principle is proof of divine intervention. What’s really happening is that we are naturally selected for the checmical makeup of our planet.
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The Earth has also been remarkably stable over its lifetime, having liquid water on the surface for most of its history apparently. Evolution seems slow and takes time.
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Just tell them about Uranus and they'll stay away.
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closest star is Alpha Centauri.
Yet from what I can infer they're not from the same gas cloud.
Nor is AC moving in the same orbit as us around the Milky Way. Due to the kinematics of our different orbits, Alpha Centauri is moving closer relative to us and in 30,000 years will will start moving further apart. [wikipedia.org]
With HD186302, we're never get any closer and it will continue to drift away from us. The hundreds of light-years of distance have been accumulated over the last 4 billion years, at that time scale we're not really moving apart that quickly.
something smells fishy here. :-D
Yes, your grasp on Newtonian physics.
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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.
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Woosh, nice pedantry you did there.
Until I was eight years old, I didn't know there was an A and a B - then I found out about Proxima! imo, the parent was being helpfully informative without being pejorative. Nice GP reference to HHGTTG, though.
4.6 billion (Score:2)
What happened 4.6 billion years ago?
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We were clouds and dust bunnies, son. All the interstellar dust just lumped together around a swirl of cloud that got squished a bit from a star having a hiccup which smooshed the dust grains together. That's what they mean we're made of star stuff. It's actually dust bunnies. Rocks come later.
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With those dust bunnies being the remnants of previous stars who have ran their lifecycle and went nova or something, scattering heavier elements around.
There are elements in our body which could only exist because they were created in earlier stars.
I just wish the drooling idiots who think the world was 6000 years old would understand that, if their god exists, he created a universe far more vast and amazing than their little pea br
Re: 4.6 billion (Score:1)
The drooling idiots tend to be much more pleasant to be around then the condescending atheists. Your post is an excellent example of why.
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Have you tried doing the condescending atheists first?
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Randomly hating on Christianity is very popular, but I don't think it's been edgy since people were nailing theses to cathedral doors.
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Fortunately, the young Earth creationists are a tiny fraction of believers. The rest of us are in wonder at the vast and amazing universe that God created.
Re:4.6 billion (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Sedate (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Meanwhile ... (Score:5, Funny)
Re: Meanwhile ... (Score:1)
A news report on a star, wow som gardy individuals, no solid surfaceand a rather high temp, joking asside you may be right
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Their Earth is exactly like ours except they gave Belgium a loss obscene name.
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I for one would like to welcome slashdot to last week or perhaps even the week before, when I first read about this. Welcome!
Of course, it's not like I should be surprised, it happens so often.
Well /. itself will never win the frosty piss award, but that's not necessarily a bad thing: It gives the rest of us a chance to read it somewhere else, possibly the original source(s) and to ruminate well before posting. Oh yeah, and to comment on /. tardiness - hopefully just for fun.
Which ones? (Score:2)
Sun logo (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?
Re:Sun logo (Score:4, Interesting)
Indeed, both instances are messed-up. I mean, wrong logos attached to stories? Extremely easy-to-spot duplicate stories?
The more of these problems pop up, the more I think there's no one left at the wheel and everything is script-driven around here.
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Click on the Sun Microsystems logo and brings up a list of articles including "Ford Patents a Way To Remove 'New Car Smell'" and "Amazon Warehouse Collapse in Baltimore Leaves Two Dead". Which don't even have the Sun logo on them, they just happen to contain the word 'sun' buried in the text.
It's not as if humans have a better track record at /. though. Machine editors could never foul up as badly, it'd be too easy for a script to prevent dupes and remember to include story links and so forth.
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They are trolling you, and it worked. Well done, Slashdot!
Sun sibling? (Score:2)
Does it also have an Earth sibling [wikipedia.org], too?
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solar systems' half sister (Score:2)
What does it take to upgrade this to the solar system's twin? Or will these solar-twin systems forever remain half sisters?
Abby Norma (Score:1)
Name the star Abby, then we have Abby Norma.