Fascinated to read that a recent study suggests not only might we find life out there in space but we might also find our distant relatives! The Sun formed around 4.5 billion years ago and its more than likely that it formed as part of a cluster with other stars. In the millenia that followed, the stars drifted apart to live solitary lives but not before possible asteroid impacts on the young Earth splattered the nearby young stars with the chemicals of life.
Its all a bit of a long shot but this tantalising idea assumes that DNA, the building blocks of life itself could have been transported out into space and to neighboring planets around other nearby young stars. Astronomer Mauri Valtonen from the University of Turku in Finland, studied the Hipparchos catalog of stars for those that might have formed from the same cluster as the Sun. A couple of candidates have been identified called HIP 87382 and HIP 47399 but there should be many more, perhaps as many as a thousand.
The next steps are to find if there are any planets around those stars and if so, does life exist! If life has evolved, then any inhabitants may well be related to us! Exciting stuff.
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