Identifying Distant Solar Twin Stars Throughout the Milky Way

Solar twins – stars very similar to the Sun – are targets in a multitude of astronomical fields, e.g. stellar evolution, the evolution of chemical elements, and calibration of precise instrumentation. Previously, most solar twins were observed in the solar neighbourhood with only a few twins identified at distances up to 1 kpc. We aim to construct a method optimised to find solar twins further away than any known before, which can be used to probe for possible variation in the fine-structure constant -- (the strength of electromagnetism).