Courtesy Paula Jofré The sun and other stars are a lot like people: they’re born, they age, and they die. Oh, and they have relatives. That last idea was an insight Paula Jofré, of Diego Portales University in Chile, had along with anthropologist Robert Foley of the University of Cambridge, when the two began musing that stars birthed in particular parts of the universe could be elementally related because they condense out of the same interstellar clouds. Since then, they have studied the chemical spectra of the sun and 21 other local stars, and indeed found the equivalent of genetic connections and even a family tree. With trillions more stars across the universe, there are a lot more ancestral connections to be made. —Jeffrey Kluger