Ask Ethan: How Many Generations Of Stars Formed Before Our Sun?
“[My professor] and I were discussing the status of our Sun. I was leaning towards the Sun being a third generation star and she was thinking the Sun was second. [...] Any thoughts? And how might this be resolved with [future] technology?”
How many generations of stars formed before our Sun did? Surprisingly, this is not a questions astronomers know the answer to, nor is it one that we can envision coming up with a definitive answer for. In the modern Universe, we don’t have access to history or pre-history of the Solar System; all we can see is what remains today. The rest of it is up to us, the scientific community, to reconstruct.
But we’re pretty incredible at what we can say based on what we do know. The Sun cannot be a first-generation, pristine star, since none of those have ever been even discovered. It couldn’t be a second-generation star, because those are ubiquitous and have very different properties than our own Sun. But where are we then? And what do we know, and what remains mysterious?
It’s a great question with a remarkable set of facts behind what we know so far, all for your enjoyment on this week’s Ask Ethan!