Related papers: Placing the Solar System in its Astrophysical Cont…
With the availability of considerably more data, we revisit the question of how special our Solar System is, compared to observed exoplanetary systems. To this goal, we employ a mathematical transformation that allows for a meaningful,…
If the origin of life and the evolution of observers on a planet is favoured by atypical properties of a planet's host star, we would expect our Sun to be atypical with respect to such properties. The Sun has been described by previous…
Context. Monitoring of the photometric and chromospheric HK emission data series of stars similar to the Sun in age and average activity level showed that there is an empirical correlation between the average stellar chromospheric activity…
The compositions of stars are a critical diagnostic tool for many topics in astronomy such as the evolution of our Galaxy, the formation of planets, and the uniqueness of the Sun. Previous spectroscopic measurements indicate a large…
Magnetic activity of the Sun and other stars causes their brightness to vary. We investigate how typical the Sun's variability is compared to other solar-like stars, i.e. those with near-solar effective temperatures and rotation periods. By…
Highly-differential spectroscopic studies have revealed that the Sun is deficient in refractory elements relative to solar twins. To investigate the role of giant planets on this signature, we present a high precision abundance analysis of…
A reasonable basis for future astronomical investigations of exoplanets lies in our best knowledge of the planets and satellites in the Solar System. Solar System bodies exhibit a wide variety of surface environments, even including…
For more than 140 years the chemical composition of our Sun has been considered typical of solar-type stars. Our highly differential elemental abundance analysis of unprecedented accuracy (~0.01 dex) of the Sun relative to solar twins,…
We have conducted a differential elemental abundance analysis of unprecedented accuracy (0.01 dex) of the Sun relative to 11 solar twins from the Hipparcos catalogue and 10 solar analogs from planet searches. We find that the Sun shows a…
The Sun is used as the fundamental standard in chemical abundance studies, thus it is important to know whether the solar abundance pattern is representative of the solar neighborhood. Albeit at low precision (0.05 - 0.10 dex) the Sun seems…
The known population of exoplanets exhibits a much wider range of orbital eccentricities than Solar System planets and has a much higher average eccentricity. These facts have been widely interpreted to indicate that the Solar System is an…
We derive the abundance of 19 elements in a sample of 64 stars with fundamental parameters very similar to solar, which minimizes the impact of systematic errors in our spectroscopic 1D-LTE differential analysis, using high-resolution…
The aim of this work is to obtain precise atmospheric parameters and chemical abundances automatically for solar twins and analogs to find signatures of exoplanets, as well as to assess how peculiar the Sun is compared to these stars and to…
A surprisingly large amount of information on our solar system can be gained from simple measurements of the apparent angular diameters of the sun and the moon. This information includes the average density of the sun, the distance between…
As the powerhouse of our solar system, the Sun's electromagnetic planetary influences appear contradictory. On the one hand, the Sun for aeons emitted radiation which was "just right" for life to evolve in our terrestrial Goldilocks zone,…
Several investigations of FGK stars in the solar neighborhood have suggested that thin-disk stars with an iron abundance similar to the Sun appear to show higher abundances of other elements, such as silicon, titanium, or nickel. Offsets…
The Sun provides a standard reference against which we compare the chemical abundances found anywhere else in the Universe. Nevertheless, there is not a unique 'solar' composition, since the chemical abundances found in the solar interior,…
Exoplanet surveys have confirmed one of humanity's (and all teenagers') worst fears: we are weird. If our Solar System were observed with present-day Earth technology -- to put our system and exoplanets on the same footing -- Jupiter is the…
Recently acquired evidence shows that extrasolar asteroids exhibit over a factor of 100 variation in the iron to aluminum abundance ratio. This large range likely is a consequence of igneous differentiation that resulted from heating…
We consider the metallicities and kinematics of nearby stars known to have planetary-mass companions in the general context of the overall properties of the local Galactic Disk. We have used Stromgren photometry to determine abundances for…