Is the location of the star that would have created our sun known? Meaning our sun's parent star which would have provided the material when it died? If not, has there been any theories on what kind of star it would have been, it’s age, mass etc? And would our sun parent star created other near by stars like Proxima Centaurea?
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2$\begingroup$ Related: astronomy.stackexchange.com/q/54577/16685 & astronomy.stackexchange.com/q/28077/16685 $\endgroup$– PM 2RingCommented Dec 4, 2023 at 3:01
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$\begingroup$ @PM2Ring This is great, thanks for these two links. They go some way into answering my questions. $\endgroup$– eBookwormCommented Dec 4, 2023 at 10:01
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7$\begingroup$ Also, the nearby stars like Proxima Centauri were probably not nearby 4.5 billion years ago. See astronomy.stackexchange.com/q/43425/16685 $\endgroup$– PM 2RingCommented Dec 4, 2023 at 10:40
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2 Answers
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There is no single progenitor of the Sun. The material that makes up the Solar System (or at least the elements heavier than helium) were made in approximately a billion stars that lived and died before the sun was born. See https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/a/16313/2531 .
The one billion number is an order of magnitude estimate for the number of stars more massive than the Sun that have been born in our Galaxy and died more than 4.6 billion years ago. Mixing processes within the interstellar medium are then quick enough to disperse this material, to a greater or lesser extent, around the Galaxy.
There is speculation that the protosolar nebula may have been seeded with the detritus of one or two nearby supernovae, but that hypothesis is made simply to explain the presence of some short-lived radionuclides in the early Solar System. These events, if they happened, cannot have provided the bulk of the heavier elements in the Sun and planets (or the hydrogen and helium that come mainly from the big bang). On the contrary, there is evidence for many, many progenitors found in the diverse isotopic ratios found inside small mineral grains trapped in meteorites.
The stars that are near the Sun now were almost certainly nowhere near it when the Sun was born. Stars have relative motions of tens of km/s (or tens of pc per million years) and can also migrate radially by thousands of pc during their lives.
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9$\begingroup$ In order to visualize the last point you make, I can encourage to set time to -+100000 years in stellarium. You will not recognizer most constellations $\endgroup$ Commented Dec 4, 2023 at 19:17
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This supernova exploded about (somewhat before) 4,568.2 million years ago (the likely age of the oldest meteorites dated to time, source).
It was not the only source of the material for the Sun, but the shock front from this supernova has hit the protosolar nebula, causing it to collapse and new stars to form (including the Sun).
Isotopically anomalous material from the supernova might be found in some parts of our Solar system. You can read about this here, even if so far these super-old events may lack evidence. This star contributed much more material than "many other stars", but a big part of it also came from the cloud.
