Is the Sun from another galaxy?

Bad Astronomy
By Phil Plait
Jun 28, 2007 5:59 AMApr 12, 2023 1:36 PM

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Note: I generally don't do a thorough debunking of pseudoscientific nonsense on the blog, and instead relegate that to the main site. But I decided to do this on the blog, knowing that more people would read it than if I put it on the main site and linked to it from the blog. So here it is. Bon appetit. We've always assumed the Sun was born in the Milky Way, and has been here its whole life. Is it possible it was actually born in a different galaxy, and the Milky Way stole it? Do we have (cue evil music)... an alien Sun?

No. Oh, you want more info? Alrighty then, sit back. This'll be fun. Introduction A website called Viewzone recently posted an article claiming that scientists have determined the Sun is not native to the Milky Way Galaxy, but instead was absorbed by the Milky Way while eating a smaller dwarf galaxy. There's just one eensy weensy problem with this: it's totally wrong. Here's how the writer from Viewzone sets this up; I have synopsized but kept his argument intact: 1) The Milky Way is eating a smaller galaxy, called the Sagittarius Dwarf galaxy. 2) Because this galaxy has far less mass than our own, the Milky Way has far stronger gravity. This has destroyed the other galaxy, turning it into a long stream of stars. 3) This stream is at an angle to the plane of the Milky Way's disk, and intersects that disk. 4) The Sun is very near the position of this intersection. The odds of this happening are very low. 5) Therefore, the Sun originally came from the dwarf galaxy, and is not originally from the Milky Way. I'm not exaggerating their claim at all. They make it very clear, saying:

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