Solar sibling

Yeah, so this project kind of came out of some previous work that I was doing with one of the co-authors on the paper, Simone Portuguese-Swart.

And it was something we just finished up maybe five or six years ago on something called Solar Siblings.

So when stars form, they don't form by themselves in a galaxy.

So you have these big molecular clouds, they collapse, and they don't just collapse to form one star by themselves.

They fragment and multiple stars will form.

Sometimes you just get a few tens of stars and they drift apart pretty quickly.

sometimes you can get thousands or millions of stars all from the same cloud and they can hang out and remain bound together for quite a while and so stars that form out of the same cloud we call siblings and so at the time we were kind of combining some of the simulations we're doing with some observational data sets to try to find solar siblings so stars that formed in the same gas cloud as our own sun And this was understandably difficult, right? Because you have the cluster the sun formed in broke up a long time ago.

The galaxy and its gravitational potential has spread out all those stars throughout the Milky Way.