HERE鈥橲 an apple that landed far from the tree. A dim star just 13 light years from Earth was born in a cluster 17,000 light years away.
Kapteyn鈥檚 Star is the 25th nearest star system to our sun, but it is no local, says Elizabeth Wylie-de Boer of Mount Stromlo Observatory in Canberra.
The cool star鈥檚 composition is tricky to study, but you can look at 16 other stars in the same 鈥渕oving group鈥�, all of which orbit the galaxy backwards and are very old. Of the stars, 14 had the same abundance of elements as Omega Centauri, the galaxy鈥檚 most luminous globular cluster.
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鈥淚t鈥檚 long been thought that Omega Centauri is the left-over nucleus of a dwarf galaxy that merged with the Milky Way,鈥� says Wylie-de Boer, whose paper will appear in the Astronomical Journal. During the merger, some stars, including Kapteyn鈥檚 Star, were flung towards us.