Dr Ramirez’s team has ruled out any massive planets orbiting close to the star.
“It’s unlikely that a Jupiter analog orbits the star,” Dr Ramirez said.
However, he and his colleagues do not rule out the presence of smaller terrestrial planets.
“The finding of a single solar sibling is intriguing, but the project has a larger purpose:
to create a road map for how to identify solar siblings, in preparation for the flood of data expected soon from surveys such as ESA’s Gaia.”
Gaia will provide accurate distances and proper motions for a billion stars, allowing scientists to search for solar siblings all the way to the center of our Milky Way Galaxy.
“The number of stars that we can
study will increase by a factor of 10,000,” Dr Ramirez said.
“Don’t invest a lot of time in analyzing every detail in every star. You can concentrate on certain key chemical elements that are going to be very useful. These elements are ones that vary greatly among stars, which otherwise have very similar chemical compositions. These highly variable chemical elements are largely dependent on where in the Galaxy the star formed.”