An international team of scientists and astronomers has discovered an almost identical twin to our sun, in a promising development which could help narrow down our search for another habitable world.
It is estimated that up to 85 percent of all stars could be binary pairs (or triplets or quadruplets) as stars tend to form in stellar nurseries, which are vast clouds of gas and dust which can often form thousands of stars.
With this in mind, using cutting-edge techniques including the latest astrometric data from the ESA’s GAIA space observatory, scientists at the Instituto de Astrofísica e Ciências do Espaço (IA) in Portugal believe they have found our sun’s binary sibling some 184 light years away.
“Since there isn’t much information about the sun’s past, studying these stars can help us understand where in the Galaxy and under which conditions the sun was formed,” said astronomer Vardan Adibekyan of IA.
h/t keybored