© ESO/L. Calcada
Only last week, news emerged of more than 300 previously-unrecognised clusters of young stars, still largely obscured by dust. In time, and usually within a few hundred million years, such stars emerge from their dusty cocoons and drift apart to follow their own orbits about the centre of the galaxy. Being built from the same raw material gives each of the stars precisely the same chemical makeup, while their orbits too can point to a shared origin.
These clues have been used by a team of astronomers led by the University of Texas to identify the Sun's potential sibling. Still unnamed but known as HD 162826 or by a number of other catalogue designations, it is plainly visible through binoculars high in our summer night sky. Our chart depicts a band of sky more than 50° wide and centred some 70° high in our SSE at midnight at present. Vega in Lyra is by far the most obvious star, though the equally-bright Arcturus in Bootes stands another 15° beyond the chart's right-hand border.
Comment: The Obenberger team and New Scientist seem to be behind times, perhaps this stems from being loyal to mainstream models? The team should read Pierre Lescaudron and Laura Knight-Jadczyk's new book, which drops plenty of explanations from the winning Electric Universe model. Demystifying phenomena like how fireballs not only produce VLF radio waves but also electrophonic phenomena which make simultaneous seeing and hearing of fireballs possible (despite being too far removed by the speed of sound), a possible source for the strange sounds heard all over the world these latest years. These and many other not commonly acknowledged interactions of our plasma rich universe, are explained there in perfectly sound and ordinary terms, such as lightning.