2009/03/02 by S. Portegies Zwart · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #astro-ph.GA #astro-ph.EP
paper · pdf · doi:10.1088/0004-637x/696/1/l13
published as Astrophys.J.696:L13-L16,2009 · Submitted to ApJ Letters
arxiv created 2009/03/02 · arxiv updated 2011/02/11
The anomalous chemical abundances and the structure of the Edgewood-Kuiper belt observed in the solar system constrain the initial mass and radius of the star cluster in which the sun was born to M≃500 to 3000 \msun and R≃ 1 to 3 pc. When the cluster dissolved the siblings of the sun dispersed through the galaxy, but they remained on a similar orbit around the Galactic center. Today these stars hide among the field stars, but 10 to 60 of them are still present within a distance of ∼ 100 pc. These siblings of the sun can be identified by accurate measurements of their chemical abundances, positions and their velocities. Finding even a few will strongly constrain the parameters of the parental star cluster and the location in the Galaxy where we were born.