Mapping the Family Tree of Stars
Astronomers are borrowing principles applied in biology and archaeology to build a family tree of the stars in our galaxy. By studying chemical signatures found in the stars, they are piecing together evolutionary trees looking at how the stars formed and how they are connected to each other. The signatures act as a proxy for DNA sequences. It's akin to chemical tagging of stars and forms the basis of a discipline astronomers refer to as Galactic Archaeology.
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