Tag: proper motion

When our Sun formed 4.6 billion years ago, it almost certainly was a member of an open star cluster. Over several hundred million years, most of the stars in this cluster would have dissipated. Is there any hope, then, of finding some of our solar siblings?

I ran a query against the Gaia DR3 database to find stars with radial velocities and proper motions that are zero, within the measurement uncertainties. In other words, their space motions appear to be similar to that of the Sun. Could some of these stars be our long lost solar siblings?

First, some caveats.

• 4.6 billion years is a lot of time, and dynamical evolution may lead to solar siblings no longer having comparable space motions to the Sun.
• Error bars for the radial velocities, proper motions, and distances of many of these stars are large enough that subsequent more precise measurements may show that they are not co-moving with the Sun.
• Though radial velocities are not affected by increasing star distance, proper motions are; therefore, proper motion in right ascension and declination will approach zero with increasing stellar distance
• Some co-moving stars will be coincidental, especially if they are at large distances

I found 230 candidate stars in Gaia DR3 that appear to be co-moving with the Sun. They are listed in the table below.

Gaia DR3 Zero Space Motion

Please note that a distance of 999,999 ly (light years) indicates a Gaia parallax that is negative, meaning that the star is so far away that a reliable parallax cannot be measured. In other words, it is zero. Also, the farther away the star is, the more uncertainty there is in the distance.

19 of these 230 stars are bright enough, important enough, or lucky enough to have entries in the SIMBAD database. The nearest of these is TYC 8312-3134-1 which is 518 ly away in the constellation Norma.

We can do a simple BOTEC to determine how fast TYC 8312-3134-1 would have to be moving relative to the Sun to travel 518 ly in 4.6 Gyr. The answer is just 0.03 km/s = 30 meters/second. This is much less than the typical space motion of stars in the solar neighborhood relative to the Sun, which is on the order of many kilometers per second. It is therefore completely plausible that solar siblings could now be at a distance of at least 500 ly and even many times further than that.

Reference

SELECT TOP 2000   gaia_source.source_id,gaia_source.ra,gaia_source.dec,gaia_source.parallax,gaia_source.pmra,gaia_source.pmdec,gaia_source.ruwe,gaia_source.phot_g_mean_mag,gaia_source.bp_rp,gaia_source.radial_velocity,gaia_source.radial_velocity_error,gaia_source.phot_variable_flag,gaia_source.non_single_star,gaia_source.has_xp_continuous,gaia_source.has_xp_sampled,gaia_source.has_rvs,gaia_source.has_epoch_photometry,gaia_source.has_epoch_rv,gaia_source.has_mcmc_gspphot,gaia_source.has_mcmc_msc,gaia_source.teff_gspphot,gaia_source.logg_gspphot,gaia_source.mh_gspphot,gaia_source.distance_gspphot,gaia_source.azero_gspphot,gaia_source.ag_gspphot,gaia_source.ebpminrp_gspphot
FROM gaiadr3.gaia_source 
WHERE (gaiadr3.gaia_source.radial_velocity-gaiadr3.gaia_source.radial_velocity_error <= 0)
  and (gaiadr3.gaia_source.radial_velocity+gaiadr3.gaia_source.radial_velocity_error >= 0)
  and (gaiadr3.gaia_source.pmra-gaiadr3.gaia_source.pmra_error <= 0)
  and (gaiadr3.gaia_source.pmra+gaiadr3.gaia_source.pmra_error >= 0)
  and (gaiadr3.gaia_source.pmdec-gaiadr3.gaia_source.pmdec_error <= 0)
  and (gaiadr3.gaia_source.pmdec+gaiadr3.gaia_source.pmdec_error >= 0);