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Probabilities for Solar Siblings

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Abstract

We have shown previously (Bobylev et al. Astron Lett 37:550–562, 2011) that some of the stars in the solar neighborhood today may have originated in the same star cluster as the Sun, and could thus be called Solar Siblings. In this work we investigate the sensitivity of this result to galactic models and to parameters of these models, and also extend the sample of orbits. There are a number of good candidates for the sibling category, but due to the long period of orbit evolution since the break-up of the birth cluster of the Sun, one can only attach probabilities of membership. We find that up to 10 % (but more likely around 1 %) of the members of the Sun’s birth cluster could be still found within 100 pc from the Sun today.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the “Nonstationary Phenomena in Objects of the Universe” Program of the Presidium of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the “Multiwavelength Astrophysical Research” grant no. NSh–16245.2012.2 from the President of the Russian Federation. It is also supported by grants from Finnish Society for Sciences and Letters and from Finnish Academy of Science and Letters.

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Correspondence to Mauri Valtonen.

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Results of this paper were partially presented as Paper DDA 103.03 at the 44th Annual Meeting of the Division on Dynamical Astronomy of the American Astronomical Society, 2013, Paraty, Brazil.

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Valtonen, M., Bajkova, A.T., Bobylev, V.V. et al. Probabilities for Solar Siblings. Celest Mech Dyn Astr 121, 107–119 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10569-014-9592-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10569-014-9592-1

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