Is our sun part of a star cluster?

[lilythmagebor]

Because I was curious about this, I read here that, "Our own Sun is part of an open cluster than includes other nearby stars such as Alpha Centauri and Barnard's star."
However, I cannot find any other pages claiming this, and the wikipedia entry on star clusters does not mention us being within a cluster, which I would think would be a rather important thing to mention.
Can anyone give me a definitive 'yes' or 'no' on this one?

 

[turbo]

The Sun is not part of any cluster. Are there stars that are nearby (in galactic terms)? Yes. Are they part of of a gravitationally-bound group? Nope.

If you have access to a small telescope, look at the double cluster. That's what open clusters look like.

 

[Drakkith]

I think your link is supposed to say that the sun USED to be part of an open cluster. By its own words it says that the stars will disperse due to interactions with other objects over time.

 

[ideasrule]

"Typical star densities in the centre of a cluster are about 1.5 stars per cubic light year (the stellar density near the sun is about 0.003 star per cubic light year)."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_cluster#Morphology_and_classification

Open clusters tend to be young because gravitational interactions disperse its members over time. According to the same article, the half life of open clusters is 150-800 million years. The Sun is 4.6 billion years old, so if it once belonged to an open cluster, that cluster had plenty of time to dissipate.

 

[Nik_2213]

IIRC, the dispersion rate of 'mid-sized' stars such as our Sun's G8 is important because it would make the difference between sibs being 40~~50 LY apart, so fairly easy to spot, and 100~~200 LY apart, so statistically dubious...

With luck, searching for 'metal rich' stars in our galactic arm may find some plausible candidates...

 

[Vanadium 50]

To add to the mix, even if the sun were part of an open cluster, there's no way Barnard's Star would be a member of it.