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  • RESEARCH HIGHLIGHT

How many siblings did the Sun have? Ancient dust holds clues

Modelling suggests that the Sun’s ‘birth cluster’ could have contained as many as 20,000 stars.
3D illustration of gravitational waves from a core-collapse supernova explosion

A type of exploding star called a core-collapse supernova (artist’s illustration) seeded the early Solar System with aluminium, according to one theory. Credit: Peter Jurik/Alamy

The Sun was born within a cluster of stars. Seeking to determine the number of stars in that birth cluster, Sota Arakawa at the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology in Yokohama and Eiichiro Kokubo at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan in Tokyo focused on aluminium-rich minerals found in some of the oldest dust particles in the Solar System1.

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Nature 615, 191 (2023)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-00569-1

References

  1. Arakawa, S. & Kokubo, E. Astron. Astrophys. 670, A105 (2023).

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