Astronomers have discovered new information about the Sun’s origin

Although the Sun is essential to life on Earth, its origin remains shrouded in mystery. To answer some of these questions, researchers have created and studied a catalog of stars based on data collected by the Gaia satellite.

While they know that our star formed about 4.6 billion years ago in a region located near the center of our galaxy, some information is still missing. To fill out the blanks, Daisuke Taniguchi of Tokyo Metropolitan University and Takuji Tsujimoto of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan have conducted a study on stars similar to the Sun, with the same composition, mass, and temperature.

In total, they created a catalog of 6,594 stars and sorted them by age. This is how they discovered a large number of stars between 4 and 6 billion years old, corresponding to the Sun’s age. Consequently, based on these similarities, the researchers believe that the Sun has traveled a long distance across our galaxy, away from its central regions.

This discovery also sheds light on the corotation barrier in our Milky Way. Indeed, this bar-shaped structure in our galaxy prevents the stars from traveling, and according to astronomers, this migration occurred before its formation. But while these findings provide some answers, further studies are needed. Indeed, star formation in the Milky Way is still poorly understood, and many mysteries remain.