The star HD 162826 is 110 light years away now, but once it was much closer. Billions of years ago it was born from the same cloud of dust and gas that produced our own solar system. A team lead by astronomer Ivan Ramirez at the University of Texas at Austin identified it after years of studying 30 possible candidates.

The star was identified as a relative of ours by a combination of chemical analysis obtained by high-resolution spectroscopy and tracing a history of the stars movements through the galaxy. Ramirez and his team hope that now that one sibling has been identified the research, which will appear in the June 1 issue of the Astrophysical Journal, will help researchers find additional solar siblings.

“We want to know where we were born. If we can figure out in what part of the galaxy the sun formed, we can constrain conditions on the early solar system. That could help us understand why we are here.” said Ramirez in a statement.

Stars and solar systems are born in vast clouds of dust and gas. These clouds, which are created when older, larger stars collapse. Each cloud, or nebula, can produce thousands of stars. In the early days after star formation planets and asteroids can fly around erratically and crash into each other prior to settling into an orbit.

Ramirez and his colleagues have also speculated that this could mean that the same chemical elements which produced our solar system were also present in our Suns sibling systems. If that is true, it could mean that those systems would be better candidates than most for life. That life, if present, would have also have had roughly the same amount of time to evolve as life on Earth.

The star HD 162826 is about 15 percent larger than the Sun. It is not visible to the naked eye but can be seen with low powered binoculars near the star Vega, the brightest star in the constellation Lyra. Astronomers have already determined, based on observations, that HD 162826 doesn’t have any Jupiter type planets however, smaller, rocky, Earth-like planets are still possible.

Ramrirez pointed out that the projects primary aim was to create a system for identifying solar siblings. Data is expected soon from the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission. That mission’s goal is to create the largest and most precise 3D map of the Milky Way galaxy to date.

“The number of stars that we can study will increase by a factor of 10,000,” Ramirez said.

Once more solar siblings have been identified, dynamics specialists will be able to create models to find out when and where our solar system and its relatives were born.