<\/p>\n Moreover, most of these sibling stars were spotted in our sun\u2019s nearby neighborhood. Collectively, the samples tell of a mass movement of stars out of the galaxy’s crowded center over billions of years.<\/p>\n Article continues below <\/p>\n You may like<\/p>\n “By studying a large population of these solar twins, we found evidence suggesting that many solar twins of the same age migrated through the Milky Way<\/a> around the same time as the sun, giving us new clues about when and how the sun moved from its birthplace to its current location,” Daisuke Taniguchi<\/a>, an assistant professor at Tokyo Metropolitan University who co-led the team with Takuji Tsujimoto from the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, told Live Science in an email.<\/p>\n Migration of the stars<\/p>\n Taniguchi led one of the studies<\/a> published Thursday (March 12) in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics and co-authored the other<\/a>. Together, the studies propose that when the central “bar” of stars<\/a> and gas in the Milky Way<\/a> formed, this process both enhanced star formation and sent a number of stars into other regions of the galaxy. This formation and “migration,” as the researchers called it, also included the sun.<\/p>\n \n The Milky Way\u2019s central bar (yellow) is a dense region of stars that links our galaxy\u2019s spiral arms. (Image credit: NASA\/JPL-Caltech)<\/p>\n \u201cWe propose that the formation of the Milky Way’s central bar enhanced star formation and also triggered large-scale migration, leading to the formation and outward migration of the sun\u2014and many solar twins,\u201d Taniguchi said.<\/p>\n Previous studies had noted that, based on its composition, the sun must have moved by at least a few thousand light-years out of the galaxy’s center. But the issue is that the bar in the Milky Way serves as a “barrier” to stars moving so far away, some models show. The solution to this issue is to propose that the barrier formed only after all of the stars left the region, the scientists suggested.<\/p>\n “This scenario, if correct, could also provide new constraints on the epoch of the galactic bar formation,” Taniguchi said. The researchers suggested that our galaxy’s central bar took shape about 4 billion to 6 billion years ago. (The sun itself is roughly 4.5 billion years old, which puts it squarely within that time frame.)<\/p>\n Taniguchi pointed out that in the center of the Milky Way, supernovas and other kinds of “energetic events” tend to occur more frequently than in other regions \u2014 in part due to the extreme population density of stars there. This would make the inner parts of the galaxy potentially hostile to life. And that has implications for how life arose on Earth, as well as potentially other planets in the galaxy<\/a>.<\/p>\n “If the sun migrated outward relatively soon after its birth, as our study suggests, the solar system<\/a> may have spent most of its history in the quieter outer disk,” Taniguchi said. “In other words, the sun may not have arrived in a life-friendly environment purely by chance, but rather as a consequence of the formation of the galactic bar.”<\/p>\n Milky Way quiz<\/a>: How well do you know our home galaxy?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Thousands of sun “twins” spotted by a space telescope could shed new light on how our star came…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":472005,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[90,416,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-472004","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-space","8":"tag-science","9":"tag-space","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/472004","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=472004"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/472004\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/472005"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=472004"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=472004"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=472004"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"An](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/aSMtivQry2Mob5GvQEERc5.jpg\")
\n<\/p>\n