14 DAY TRIAL // Astronomers have identified a star that they've labeled the Sun's twin. Granted, there's no shortage of those, there are hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy alone and the sun's type of stars aren't exactly uncommon, though we haven't actually discovered too many of them.
But that's not all that's special about this latest find, HIP 102152, located 250 light years from the sun is that it's the oldest twin found to date.
HIP 102152 is some 8.2 billion years old, almost twice as old as our sun. This provides a great opportunity to study the transformations that occur at that age and through which our own parent star will go several billion years from now.
An international team led by astronomers in Brazil used the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope to study this star.
"For decades, astronomers have been searching for solar twins in order to know our own life-giving Sun better. But very few have been found since the first one was discovered in 1997. We have now obtained superb-quality spectra from the VLT and can scrutinise solar twins with extreme precision, to answer the question of whether the Sun is special," Jorge Melendez, of the Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil, explained.