When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission.Stars similar to our sun formed a mass migration from the center of the Milky Way, occurring approximately 4 billion to 6 billion years ago. | Credit: NAOJOur sun and a host of sun-like “solar twins” may have migrated away from the core of the Milky Way galaxy together, potentially making the solar system more hospitable to life as we know it, new research finds.Around the Milky Way are solar twins, stars that physically appear very similar to the sun. By analyzing solar twins, astronomers hope they can learn more about the history of the sun.AdvertisementAdvertisementIn two new studies, researchers examined data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia satellite, which captured data about two billion stars to create the most precise 3D map of the Milky Way ever made. They focused on 6,594 solar twins within about 1,000 light-years of Earth. This collection of solar twins is about 30 times larger than previous surveys of these stars.”We found many more solar twins with ages similar to the sun than I had expected,” researcher Daisuke Taniguchi, an astronomer at Tokyo Metropolitan University, told Space.com.By analyzing the sizes, temperatures and compositions of these nearby solar twins, Taniguchi, Takuji Tsujimoto at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan and their colleagues were able to estimate the stars’ ages. Looking at the range of ages, they noticed a broad peak for 1,551 stars about four billion to six billion years old. (This population includes our sun, which is about 4.6 billion years old.)The discovery that the sun and many of these solar twins are of similar ages and located about the same distance from the center of the galaxy suggests that the sun is not at its current position by accident. Previous research suggested that, based on the sun’s “metallicity” — its levels of elements heavier than hydrogen and helium — it was born more than 10,000 light-years closer to the galaxy’s inner regions, which are higher in metals than the part of the galaxy in which the sun now resides.AdvertisementAdvertiseme …
