Scientists in Search of Sun’s Stellar Siblings

There are billions and trillions of stars in our galaxy. Some evolved before than others, some later and few of these together. Scientists have been making repeated efforts since decades to find out which stars were born alongside the sun. These stars were formed billions of years ago and since then these have travelled far apart from each other.

Lately, through a research scientists have found out a way to trace the stellar siblings of the sun. This project is known as Galactic Archaeology. It makes use of a spectrograph in order to analyze the chemical composition of 340,000 stars. It’s just like a cosmological DNA Test. The research was done using the HERMES instrument on the Anglo-Australian Telescope in Australia. HERMES can study the light spectrum of stars, which can tell astronomers accurately which wavelengths of light make up the colour of the star. Different elements glow at different wavelengths, so the spectrum can tell astronomers which elements a star is composed of. In times to come, HERMES shall scan a million stars, precisely recording their spectrums for scientists to study. Using these data the scientists can find out the origin, composition, evolution of billions of stars in our galaxy. This shall help a lot in tracing the stellar siblings of various stars present in our galaxy and determining that how our galaxy looked like few billion years ago.

By: Anuja Arora

Source:https://www.popularmechanics.com/space/deep-space/a19941520/scientists-can-now-search-for-our-suns-stellar-siblings/