Paris (ESA) Aug 12, 2022 We all wish that we could sometimes see into the future. Now, thanks to...
Now, thanks to the very latest data from ESA's star mapping Gaia mission, astronomers can do just that for the Sun.
By accurately identifying stars of similar mass and composition, they can see how our Sun is going to evolve in the future.
Gaia takes exceptionally accurate readings of a star's apparent brightness, as seen from Earth, and its colour.
It reveals how stars evolve throughout their long life cycles.
While the mass of the star changes relatively little during its lifetime, the star's temperature and size varies greatly as it ages.
Since they allowed the age to be different, the stars they selected ended up tracing out a line across the H-R diagram that represents the evolution of our Sun from its past into its future.
Finding stars similar to the Sun is essential for understanding how we fit into the wider Universe.
"If we don't understand our own Sun - and there are many things we don't know about it - how can we expect to understand all of the other stars that make up our wonderful galaxy," says Orlagh.
It is a source of some irony that the Sun is our nearest, most studied star yet its proximity forces us to study it with completely different telescopes and instruments from those that we use to look at the rest of the stars.
To identify these 'solar analogues' in the Gaia data, Orlagh and colleagues looked for stars with temperatures, surface gravities, compositions, masses and radii that are all similar to the present-day Sun.