Sun’s Sibling Stars Could Host Cousins of Earth Life

Sun’s Sibling Stars Could Host Cousins of Earth Life

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Some scientists are searching not just for any life out there in the universe, but for our distant relatives. Earth may have seeded life on other planets if an asteroid smacking into Earth sprayed DNA into space, researchers suggest. Now a team of researchers is searching for siblings of the sun — stars born from the same parent star cluster — whose planets could have been impregnated with Earth life this way.

The sun is thought to have formed around 4.5 billion years ago within a cluster of thousands of baby stars. After around 1 billion years, this cluster broke up and the sibling stars went their separate ways. But before that point, researchers say, some of these stars may have shared life in the form of bacteria or DNA molecules.