A newly identified star that lies 110 light-years from Earth is the Sun's brother, an astronomer from the University of Texas claims.
Located in the constellation Hercules, Star HD 162826 formed in the same star cluster the Sun was formed in 4.5 billion years ago, thus making it the Sun's "solar sibling," The Huffington Post reported.
Ivan Ramirez, who identified the sibling, hopes the star will shed light on how life on Earth began.
"We want to know where we were born," Ramirez said in a statement. "If we can figure out in what part of the galaxy the Sun formed, we can constrain conditions on the early solar system. That could help us understand why we are here."
Ramirez found the sibling, which is 15 times bigger than the Sun, by studying a group of 30 other stars believed to be potential siblings.
"The idea is that the Sun was born in a cluster with a thousand or a hundred thousand stars. This cluster, which formed more than 4.5 billion years ago, has since broken up," Ramirez said. "A lot of things can happen in that amount of time," such as the member stars breaking away to form their own orbit, according to the statement.
By studying the stars' chemical composition, Ramirez and his team eliminated the other stars as potential matches until he arrived at one that met the "dynamical and chemical criteria for being a true sibling of the Sun," according to the statement.
Scientists believe that sibling stars host planets outside our solar system that are similar to Earth. When the planets were formed in clusters, chunks could have been knocked off as a result of collisions, Ramirez said. Those chunks could have contained life that later flourished after landing on an Earth-like planet.
"So it could be argued that solar siblings are key candidates in the search for extraterrestrial life," Ramirez said.
News of the solar sibling will be published in The Astrophysical Journal on June 1.
