The Sun's Oldest Twin Detected
Astronomers working with ESO's very large telescopes in Brazil have discovered the oldest twin of the sun. Located 250 million light-years away, HIP 102152 is the star most similar to the sun, but is 4 billion years older.
Astronomers have only been studying the sun for 400 years, a fraction of the sun's 4.6 billion-year lifetime. It's difficult to obtain definitive information about our sun's evolution and formation in such a short time, but we can make this study more precise by finding and studying its twins of different ages.
Jorge Melendez (University of Sao Paulo, Brazil), leader of the research team and co-author of the new paper, explains: “Astronomers For decades, scientists have been searching for solar twins to better understand our life-giving Sun. However, very few have been found since the first one was found in 1997. Now, thanks to the high-quality spectra taken by the VLT, we can study solar twins with extraordinary precision and answer questions about just how special the Sun is."
Astronomers have so far been able to study two stars thought to be the Sun's twin: the younger 18 Scorpio and the older HIP 102152. To learn the stars' chemical composition, the stars' light spectra were analyzed using the UVES spectrograph on the very large telescope.
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