About 250 light-years away in the constellation Capricornus (The Sea Goat) lies a star that looks awfully familiar.
Known as HIP 102152, the star is a virtual twin of our sun, which in and of itself is not so unusual. But HIP 102152 is older than our 4.6-billion-year old sun — by nearly 4 billion years, making it the oldest solar twin found to date.
“It is important for us to understand our sun in the proper context of stellar astronomy and to identify which of its properties are unique and normal, to predict what its fate may someday be,” astronomer TalaWanda Monroe, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of San Paulo in Brazil, wrote in an email to Discovery News.
VIDEO: SDO Captures Eruptions on Sun
New high-definition footage from the Solar Dynamic Observatory shows coronal mass ejections, huge eruptions of plasma blasting into space before showering back down on the sun’s surface.
NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory
With human lifespans so limited, seeing the sun in context means astronomers must find stars with similar mass, chemical composition, temperature and other characteristics. From that, they can then extrapolate information about our sun, such as how bright it shined in its youth and how different its radiation may be in the future.
“HIP 102152 is an ideal star to anchor the end of the timeline,” Monroe said.
Sun's 8.2-billion-year-old twin found
No comments:
Post a Comment