A lifetime on earth is brief, when compared to the scope of the universe. The Earth formed 4.54 billion years ago, with life appearing approximately 1 billion years later. A human being forms in nine months, and is fortunate if they can last an entire century.
For this reason, it's hard for researchers to gauge what's going on in the long-term with the heavenly bodies. But now, scientists in Brazil have found a solar twin to the sun that may help shed light on just that.
Approximately 250 light-years away, the star named HIP 102152 is a virtual match for our own sun. Sitting in the constellation Capricornus, the star is referred to as a "solar twin" for the degree to which it's identical to our own sun. However, unlike the Sun, this star is 8.2 billion years old. Since our sun is 4.6 billion years old, scientists believe they'll be able to learn more about what's in store for our own star as it ages in the coming eons.
"It is important for us to understand our sun in the proper context of stellar astronomy and to identify which of its properties are unique and normal, to predict what its fate may someday be," astronomer TalaWanda Monroe, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of San Paulo in Brazil, wrote in an email to Discovery News.
Furthermore, the star appears to have rocky bodies and/or planets orbiting it, once again calling to mind the age-old question of life on other planets.
For understanding life from outside of our own orbit, HIP 102152 represents the second big news from space this year. In April, NASA's Kepler satellite identified three planets that show promising conditions for life outside of earth. The sun they orbit - Kepler-62 - is smaller and cooler than our sun, but the planets are the right distance from that star to be potentially inhabitable.
"With all of these discoveries we're finding, Earth is looking less and less like a special place and more like there's Earth-like things everywhere," Thomas Barclay, Kepler scientist at the Bay Area Environmental Research Institute in Sonoma, California, told CNN.