HD 162826 (HR 6669, HIP 87382) is a star in the constellation Hercules. It is about away from Earth. With an apparent magnitude of 6.55, the star can be found with binoculars or a low-power telescope by reference to nearby Vega in the constellation Lyra. The star is considered to be a stellar sibling of the Sun and is the first such sibling to be discovered. Solar siblings are those stars that formed from the same gas cloud and in the same star cluster; the term was introduced in 2009. No planets have been detected orbiting HD 162826, but due to its metallicity, it is likely to harbor terrestrial planets; the star's spectra had been under observation previously. In November 2018, a second potential solar twin was announced, HD 186302, an 8th magnitude star in the Pavo constellation. Origin In May 2014, astronomers at the University of Texas at Austin announced that HD 162826 is "almost certainly" one of what may be thousands of siblings of the Sun, emerging from the same stellar nursery some 4.5 billion years ago. This conclusion was reached by determining it has the same chemical composition as the Sun, including rare elements such as barium and yttrium, and by determining its orbit and projecting backward its revolutions about the galactic center. The cluster in which HD 162826 and the Sun formed is believed to have been an open cluster, permitting the stars to scatter widely over time. The stars in this cluster were not too closely packed during their formation to disrupt planetary disk development, but were not so far apart as to prevent the seeding of Earth with radioactive elements produced by a nearby supernova. The discovery of a first solar sibling by searching for specific rare elements may make it easier to identify other siblings in the future. However, HD 162826 is probably the nearest solar sibling, because others would have been identified first if they had been closer to the Sun. It had not been expected that even one sibling would be found at this relatively short distance; the study that identified this star worked on a dataset of only 100,000 stars, to prepare to receive data about billions of stars expected from the Gaia Space Telescope in five to ten years. Possible planets and habitability HD 162826 has no known planets. The current state of knowledge excludes hot Jupiters and suggests