Astronomers Have Found the Sun's Baby Twin

Eagle Nebula, also known as the Pillars of Creation, a young open cluster of stars, is like a stellar womb where astronomers have spotted a stellar embryo that could grow into a twin of our Sun.

This baby star would be the earliest stage in a star's development ever detected.

Hidden in a nodule of the left pillar, "E42" is an evaporating gas globule (EGG), a dense mass of interstellar gas from which a star is born.

This EGG has the mass of our sun and seems to be maturing in a similar violent environment to that which gave birth to our sun. "We think this is a very, very early version of our own sun," said Jeffrey Linsky of JILA, a joint institute of the University of Colorado, Boulder and the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

The Eagle Nebula is a star-generating space region, where gas and dust feed the birth of new stars, and is situated about 7,000 light-years from Earth. Many of the stars born here are now located just outside the region, where their ultraviolet emissions sculpt out the structures.

This EEG is one of the 73 found in the Pillars of Creation in 1995 with the Hubble Space Telescope. 11 of the EEGs harbor infant stellar objects, but only four are big enough to form a star and only E42 one as big as our sun. "The four proto-stars that we have identified on the edges of the pillars are probably the youngest stars ever imaged by astronomers," said Linsky.

The X-ray technology enabled astronomers to detect about 1,100 hot, mature stars in the Eagle Nebula, but the immature EGGs were not emitting any X-rays, but infrared emissions betrayed them. "The results indicate young, evolving stars like E42 have not yet developed the magnetic structures needed to produce X-rays," he said.

E42 is also developing in an environment similar to that which gave birth to our sun, 5 billion years ago, only that our sun emerged from masses of dust and gas seared by ultraviolet radiation and hit by shock waves from at least one supernova explosion. "The sun was likely born in a region like the Pillars of Creation because the chemical abundances in the solar system indicate that a supernova occurred nearby and contributed its heavy elements to the gas of which the Sun and the planets formed," Linsky said.