New research provides a closer look at a nearby star thought to resemble our young Sun. The work allows scientists to better understand what our Sun may have been like when it was young, and how it may have shaped the atmosphere of our planet and the development of life on Earth.
Many people dream of meeting with a younger version of themselves to exchange advice, identify the origins of their defining traits, and share hopes for the future. At 4.65 billion years old, our Sun is a middle-aged star. Scientists are often curious to learn exactly what properties enabled our Sun, in its younger years, to support life on nearby Earth.
Without a time machine to transport scientists back billions of years, retracing our star’s early activity may seem an impossible feat. Luckily, in the Milky Way galaxy — the glimmering, spiraling segment of the universe where our solar system is located — there are more than 100 billion stars. One in ten share characteristics with our Sun, and many are in the early stages of development.
«Imagine I want to reproduce a baby picture of an adult when they were one or two years old, and all of their pictures were erased or lost. I would look at a photo of them now, and their close relatives’ photos from around that age, and from there, reconstruct their baby photos,» said Vladimir Airapetian, senior astrophysicist in the Heliophysics Division at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and first author on the new study. «That’s the sort of process we are following here — looking at characteristics of a young star similar to ours, to better understand what our own star was like in its youth, and what allowed it to foster life on one of its nearby planets.»
Kappa 1 Ceti is one such solar analogue. The star is located about 30 light-years away (in space terms, that’s like a neighbor who lives on the next street over) and is estimated to be between 600 to 750 million years old, around the same age our Sun was when life developed on Earth. It also has a similar mass and surface temperature to our Sun, said the study’s second author, Meng Jin, a heliophysicist with the SETI Institute and the Lockheed Martin Solar and Astrophysics Laboratory in California. All of those factors make Kappa 1 Ceti a «twin» of our young Sun at the time when life arose on Earth, and an important target for study.
Airapetian, Jin, and several colleagues have adapted an existing solar model to predict some of Kappa 1 Ceti’s most important, yet difficult to measure, characteristics. The model relies on data input from a variety of space missions including the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite and NICER missions, and ESA’s XMM-Newton. The team published their study today in The Astrophysical Journal.
Star Power
Story Source: Materials provided by NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.