The Wow! Signal: Intercepted Alien Transmission?

SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, has seen astronomers scouring the sky for decades in hopes of receiving artificially generated radio signals sent by alien civilizations. But then, there’s a good chance we’ve already found just such a signal. And 1977 saw the most tantalizing glimpse ever.
Nicknamed the “Wow!” signal, this was a brief burst of radio waves detected by astronomer Jerry Ehman who was working on a SETI project at the Big Ear radio telescope, Ohio. The signal was, in fact, so remarkable that Ehman circled it on the computer printout, writing “Wow!” in the margin — and unintentionally giving the received radio signal the name under which it would become famous.


SETI: No Alien Life Found, Yet!

Despite a lot of effort, no identification has been found for the signal’s source, and no repeat signal has ever been found. It’s a complete mystery. The only conclusion that can be drawn is if the signal truly did originate in deep space, then it was either an astrophysical phenomenon of which we’ve never seen before, or it truly was an intercepted alien signal.

To explain scientific observations, the normal method is to construct hypotheses and then test them. If your hypothesis is incorrect, it will fail to explain the observation. You can then continue this way, using different hypotheses, until you find something which can accurately describe what you’ve observed (if you ever watch Mythbusters, you may be familiar with how this works).

But with the Wow! signal, researchers ran into difficulty. After trying and failing to find any repeat of the signal, Ehman was skeptical of its origin, stating that “something suggests it was an Earth-sourced signal that simply got reflected off a piece of space debris.” But when he tried to investigate that explanation, he only found more problems.

Investigations found that it was scarcely possible the signal could have originated on Earth, and reflection off a piece of space junk was equally unlikely. The received signal was very specific, and these explanations required too many assumptions. A pattern of logical thinking known as Occam’s razor was pointing towards this signal having an astrophysical origin. But this provided no explanation for what it might be.

The Hydrogen Line

The curious Wow! signal is more or less a perfect match for what would be expected from a received extraterrestrial transmission. It’s been closely analyzed as a result, but to date no one has come up with a satisfactory explanation for where the signal came from.

For a start, the signal’s intensity was observed to rise and fall over a period of 72 seconds, consistent with the rotation of Earth, and a single source tracking across the sky, through the Big Ear telescope’s view. This gave the signal a characteristic signature, caused by objects seen in the sky. It would be nearly impossible for any Earth-bound object to match it.

It also stood out dramatically over the background noise found in deep space, being about 30 times louder than anything else around it. But by far the most interesting thing about this signal was its frequency.

This signal was very sharp, transmitting at only a single frequency. Natural radio sources don’t work like that. They spread across a range of frequencies, meaning that the same signal covers a broad band of transmission. The Wow! signal is not like this at all, showing only one very specific frequency at approximately 1420 MHz.

1420 MHz, also known as the hydrogen line, is a frequency internationally banned from use by terrestrial radio signals because of its use in radio astronomy. Astronomically, it’s usually emitted by neutral hydrogen atoms in interstellar space. It’s observed roughly evenly in all directions, and has been used before to help map out the galaxy. But in the SETI program, it has another use.

ANALYSIS: No Alien Signals Detected in Kepler SETI Search

Hydrogen is the most simple and abundant element in the universe, and any intelligent civilization would know of this frequency’s presence in space and probably be using it to make astronomical observations. As a result, SETI researchers consider it a logical frequency to check for any alien transmissions intended to be heard. It’s just as logical that any astronomers elsewhere in the galaxy might think the same way.

Is Anybody Out There?

The final question in the mystery is where exactly the signal came from. Because of the way in which the Big Ear was designed, the signal’s source can be narrowed down to one of two small regions in the sky. But that’s as precise as it gets.

This puts the source of the signal somewhere in the constellation of Sagittarius. There are a handful of nearby stars, but it’s impossible to tell precisely where the signal originated. At least, not unless we ever hear a repeat signal. And given that no repeat signal has yet been found in any of the searches, it’s probably best not to hold your breath.

To date, most SETI searches have operated by sweeping the sky, observing any spot for only a few minutes at a time. While this allows a lot of coverage, it also means that the likelihood of eavesdropping on any signals that happen to be pointing in our direction is minimal. The other approach would be more like the way the Kepler mission worked, by staring at one particular patch of sky and waiting. Of course, while we now believe that exo-planets are common across the galaxy, we have much less idea when it comes to alien transmissions — for all we know, we may waste years looking in the wrong direction.Unfortunately, there’s no way for us to know what exactly caused the Wow! signal. As much as some of us would love to use it as proof of extraterrestrial life, that would be a leap of faith, and unscientific at best. Astronomer Robert Gray describes it as “…a tug on the cosmic fishing line. It doesn’t prove that you have a fish on the line, but it does suggest that you keep your line in the water at that spot.”

Logically, the conclusion that must be drawn is that the Wow! signal very likely originated in deep space, but if it did then it was either a completely unknown astronomical phenomenon, or an intercepted alien broadcast — but with nothing else to go on, there’s no way to prove or disprove either of these ideas.

For now, the Wow! signal remains as nothing more than a vague but enthralling hint that there may be more things lurking out there in this galaxy of ours than we currently know of!

What Will It Take To Find Life Elsewhere In The Universe?

The Hubble and James Webb space telescopes won't find life beyond the solar system. 

With funding and support, here's what might!

Earth rise 

NASA

The sky was hazy and overcast above Cape Canaveral, Florida, on the morning of July 8, 2011. A light breeze from offshore cooled off an estimated 750,000 onlookers braving the sticky summer heat to say goodbye to NASA’s space shuttle Atlantis. It was the final flight of a thirty-year-old spaceflight program—and the uncertain opening of an era in which humankind may find living worlds among the stars.

Five Billion Years of Solitude 

Five Billion Years of Solitude: The Search for Life Among the Stars, by Lee Billings, is available on Amazon.

Current/Penguin Group LLC

As the final countdown commenced, Chris Ferguson, the spacecraft’s commander, contemplated the program’s end with the mission’s launch director, Mike Leinbach. “The shuttle is always going to be a reflection of what a great nation can do when it dares to be bold and commits to follow-through,” Ferguson radioed from his seat astride the eighteen-story-tall, 4.5-million-pound shuttle stack. “We’re not ending the journey today, Mike, we’re completing a chapter in a journey that will never end.”Ferguson, like many before him, was echoing the core sentiment of the reclusive philosopher Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the father of modern rocket science. While Orville and Wilbur Wright pioneered powered flight at Kitty Hawk, Tsiolkovsky wrote passionately from a remote log cabin in Russia about space exploration and a human destiny amid the stars. He theorized about launching multistage rockets into orbit, living and working in outer space, and someday escaping the solar system. He also famously devised what is now known as the “rocket equation,” a mathematical formula that encapsulates all the key variables affecting a rocket’s maneuvers. “The bulk of mankind will probably never perish, but will just keep moving from sun to sun as each becomes extinguished," Tsiolkovsky wrote in an early paper, laying out the visionary impetus behind his work. “There is thus no end to the life, evolution, and improvement of mankind. Man will progress forever. And if this be so, he must surely achieve immortality.” This vision of an unbounded future beyond Earth, while implied but rarely explicitly acknowledged, remains the purest and most noble purpose behind any human space program.
Moments after Ferguson channeled Tsiolkovsky at Cape Canaveral, the shuttle’s engines and rocket boosters surged and crackled to life. Atlantis pushed her crew skyward on a quivering cataract of golden flame and electric-blue shock diamonds. The grand spectacle, however, left behind a space program fallen into quiet decay: NASA lacked a ready replacement for the shuttle fleet and was scaling back programs across the entire agency.
The space shuttle, conceived in the technological ferment of the Apollo missions, was supposed to be a revolutionary, reusable spacecraft that would fly once a week. It would make space travel cheap, frequent, and routine. Instead, President Richard Nixon balked at the projected expense, and the chimeric vehicles that finally emerged were elegant, versatile, and irreparably flawed. In nearly every aspect—cost, frequency, reusability, and safety—the shuttle program was a ruinous white elephant that failed to deliver on its most crucial promises.
The lone exception was arguably the Hubble Space Telescope, a school bus–size robotic observatory that space shuttle Discover delivered into low Earth orbit in 1990. After an audacious repair job in space, Hubble began paying off. Its view was sharp enough to discern changing weather on Mars, explosive comet impacts on Jupiter, and Saturn’s ghostly polar aurorae. Gazing out to nearby star-forming regions, the telescope spied young stars cocooned in swirling disks of gas and dust that were building planets. Hubble conclusively showed that the Andromeda galaxy would collide and merge with our Milky Way in about four billion years. And, inspecting surrounding galaxies, it found that nearly all of them had supermassive black holes at their centers.

Hubble ultra deep field 

NASA

In the fruitful years that followed Hubble’s launch and repair, NASA announced its successor: the Next Generation Space Telescope, later renamed the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Its mission would be to fully unveil the universe’s very first galaxies, the objects that manifested only as tiny red blobs in Hubble’s deepest images.
But just as NASA threw its weight behind JWST, the field of exoplanetology began its meteoric rise. Astronomers could for the first time rationally discuss the possibility of finding other Earth-like planets, to considerable public interest and acclaim. Over interstellar distances, the planet hunters calculated, our world would appear slightly fainter than a typical galaxy in a Hubble deep field image. In theory, that would be something JWST could detect, and indeed the telescope would excel at imaging hot young gas-giant planets far from their stars. But in practice, habitable planets would lie far too near their much brighter host stars.
To image a rocky planet around a star is like photographing an unlit match adjacent to a detonating hydrogen bomb.Our own Earth, for instance, is some ten billion times fainter than our Sun in visible light—for every photon reflected off our planet out to space, our star blasts out ten billion more. In infrared, the contrast ratio becomes more favorable—at those wavelengths, the Sun is only some ten million times brighter than our world. To image a rocky planet around a star is to capture a dim fleck of dust practically hugging the cusp of a thermonuclear fireball, like photographing an unlit match adjacent to a detonating hydrogen bomb. You’d have to block out all those thermonuclear photons in their millions or billions so that even a single photon reflected from a planet could be seen. Only a space-based observatory could avoid the blurring interference of Earth’s atmosphere and deliver the light of any potentially habitable planets orbiting many other stars.
At an early 1996 meeting of the American Astronomical Society in San Antonio, Texas, NASA’s then-administrator, Dan Goldin, took the stage. He presented an alluring vision of what the agency would do immediately after JWST: reshape NASA’s entire science program around astrobiology, with new life-finding space telescopes as the glittering centerpiece. “About ten years from now,” he explained, the agency could be ready to launch a “Planet Finder,” an observatory that would locate potentially habitable worlds and take their low-resolution pictures. It would look for atmospheric biosignatures in the spectrum of each small clump of planetary pixels. This was one of the earliest public mentions of what would become NASA’s “Terrestrial Planet Finder” (TPF) mission concept. If a TPF found promising worlds around nearby stars, Goldin told his rapt audience, then “perhaps in twenty-five years” even more ambitious telescopes could be built that could image those planets “with a resolution to see ocean, clouds, continents and mountain ranges.” Sometime in the twenty-first century, he later said, those revealed as living worlds could become prime targets for robotic interstellar probes.

James Webb Space Telescope mirrors 

NASA

Unfortunately, JWST’s development proved more difficult than planned. To image the earliest stars and galaxies, the telescope would need a much larger primary mirror than Hubble’s, one optimized for the infrared wavelengths (where molecular clouds, giant planets, and the earliest galaxies shine the brightest). The mirror would need to neatly fold up inside a rocket fairing. In space, it’d require cryogenic cooling so that its own internal heat would not wash out the fragile light of cosmic dawn. Finally, it could not operate in low Earth orbit, because the light-bulb-like glow of our planet at infrared wavelengths would contaminate the delicate observations.
Various international partners signed on to construct instruments or to provide a launch vehicle, but NASA would bear the brunt of the cost, which early estimates pegged at approximately $1.5 billion. Launch was tentatively scheduled for circa 2010. As the project’s true complexity and scale became clear, cost estimates were revised ever upward, but little in the way of boosted funding appeared. Instead, money for JWST would have to come from NASA’s other space-science programs. In the end, more than $2 billion would be required for technology development alone. JWST’s schedule began to slip. The project’s total cost shifted more and more major expenditures into the future. By 2012, JWST’s construction, testing, launch, and first five years of operation were estimated to cost nearly $9 billion, with a launch date no earlier than 2018.
National and global economic calamities exacerbated JWST’s birthing pains. NASA’s budget plateaued and did not keep up with monetary inflation. A trillion-dollar surplus built up in the 1990s under President Bill Clinton became a multitrillion-dollar deficit in the 2000s under the tax cuts and runaway spending of his successor, President George W. Bush. Then, after the Columbia shuttle disaster in 2003, Bush delivered a bold new mandate but without funding or deep Congressional support: return to the Moon and to deliver humans to Mars.
To pay for the ultimately doomed program, called Constellation, NASA in 2006 chose to siphon billions of dollars from its science budget. JWST’s development fell into disarray and dashed hopes for a prompt development and launch of a TPF, which was officially “deferred indefinitely.” President Barack Obama in 2010 canceled Bush’s plans, but the damage was done. To adequately fund JWST, the agency scaled back, delayed, or canceled nearly all its other major next-generation astrophysics and planetary-science missions; if the observatory was to succeed, it could only do so at the great expense of eliminating most of NASA’s space-science portfolio. For want of money and strong institutional support, a TPF seemed almost as far distant and out of reach as the stars themselves.

Terrestrial Planet Finder 

NASA

The thought weighed heavy on John Grunsfeld, an astrophysicist and NASA astronaut who had flown on five space shuttle missions, three of which to service Hubble. The press hailed Grunsfeld as a hero, and called him “Dr. Hubble.” He mulled over the hundreds of billions of dollars spent on the ISS and the shuttles, and the comparative sliver of funding required to sustain the golden age of space telescopes. He wondered how NASA’s brawny human exploration program might once again forge a powerful partnership with the agency’s purely scientific side. So, during 2003 and 2004, he served as NASA’s chief scientist and helped develop science applications for Bush’s Constellation program. Big rockets, it turns out, are just as useful for launching extremely large telescopes as they are for hurling astronauts toward the Moon. Such a rocket might make launching JWST and conceivably larger TPF-style observatories easier and cheaper. The planning backfired, however, when Constellation cast its hungry shadow over NASA’s science budget. In early 2010, Grunsfeld left NASA to serve as deputy director of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland—the pulsing nexus of operations for Hubble and, someday, for JWST. He worked closely with the institute’s director, the astronomer Matt Mountain, for nearly two years to lay the groundwork for a future TPF-style telescope. Their preferred in-house design was aptly named ATLAST, the Advanced Technology Large-Aperture Space Telescope, and was intended to deliver images of potentially habitable exoplanets. Dr. Hubble had become Dr. TPF, Dr. ATLAST.   
But in late 2011, Grunsfeld’s phone rang. NASA wanted Grunsfeld at the helm of the largest pure science budget in the world, albeit one struggling to meet all its myriad obligations. He accepted, and upon returning tamped down his past vocal advocacy for life-finding space telescopes in favor of emphasizing balance across all of NASA’s science programs. There was no announcement of bold new funding to search for alien Earths, but Grunsfeld’s closest friends and former confidants could not forget his former fervor. After nearly a year’s worth of fruitless exchanges with NASA in attempt to speak with Grunsfeld for this book, I took solace in what he had freely told me during an earlier interview.
“Hubble and Webb will probably leave us hanging on the question of whether there is life elsewhere in the universe,” he said. “What we need in the next generation of great space telescopes—and what we can achieve—is the capability to observe the atmospheres and surface features of every single habitable planet around the nearest thousand stars. We could finally find out we’re not alone. We could finally find other habitable worlds, each of which, in principle, could be visited by humans. That’s the big picture, and I want to be able to convince the public and the Congress and the future administrations that it’s worth investing in this next step.”
Clearly, Grunsfeld had read his Tsiolkovsky.

Source: PopSci

First Cloudy Alien Planet Spotted From Earth!

Artist’s conception of a cloud map of Kepler-7b (left) in comparison to Jupiter (right) 

NASA/JPL-Caltech/MIT Via Universe Today

Call it cloudy with a low chance of meatballs. The alien world Kepler-7b — a very reflective world in big telescopes — has clouds in its upper atmosphere. And scientists have actually been able to map those out, despite the planet’s great distance from Earth (at least 1,000 light-years away.)It’s the first time scientists have been able to map out clouds on a world outside of the solar system. If we can see clouds, then we can begin to think about what a planet’s climate will be, making this an important milestone in understanding the conditions on other worlds.
“Kepler-7b reflects much more light than most giant planets we’ve found, which we attribute to clouds in the upper atmosphere,” stated Thomas Barclay, Kepler scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center. “Unlike those on Earth, the cloud patterns on this planet do not seem to change much over time — it has a remarkably stable climate.”
Here’s how scientists got it done:

• Preliminary observations with the Kepler space telescope –which was designed to hunt planets until a second reaction wheel failed earlier this year — found “moon-like phases” on Kepler-7b. These showed a bright spot on the western  hemisphere.
• NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope measured Kepler-7b’s temperature using infrared light, calculating it at between 1,500 and 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit (815 and 982 degrees Celsius.)
• Something was clearly going on, as the planet is extremely close to its star; only 0.06 Earth-sun distances away. The temperature was too cool. They figured out that the light was reflected off cloud tops on the planet’s west side.

Another cool fact — Kepler-7b, like Saturn, would float if it was put in a big enough tub of water!
You can read more details in the technical paper online here. The study, which was led by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has been accepted to the Astrophysical Journal, but not published yet.

Source: NASA

Plastic ingredient found on Saturn's moon Titan!

A flash of sunlight reflected off a lake on Saturn's moon Titan was captured in this image captured by NASA's Cassini spacecraft in 2009. Cassini recently detected a small amount of propylene in Titan's lower atmosphere. (REUTERS)

NASA's Cassini spacecraft has found propylene, a chemical used to make household plastic containers, on Saturn's moon Titan, the space agency said.

"This is the first definitive detection of the plastic ingredient on any moon or planet, other than Earth," NASA said.

A small amount of propylene was identified in Titan's lower atmosphere by Cassini's composite infrared spectrometer, which measures heat radiation, the agency reported in Monday's edition of the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

By isolating the same signal at various altitudes within the lower atmosphere, researchers identified the chemical's unique thermal fingerprint with a high degree of confidence, NASA said.

"This chemical is all around us in everyday life, strung together in long chains to form a plastic called polypropylene," said Conor Nixon, a scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and lead author of the paper.

"That plastic container at the grocery store with the recycling code 5 on the bottom — that's polypropylene."

The chemical is also used to make car bumpers and other consumer products.

The discovery could help scientists understand the "chemical zoo" that makes up Titan's hazy brownish atmosphere, said Scott Edgington, Cassini's deputy project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency!

Toyota gives 'space robot' a voice!

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Toyota robonaut Kirobo strikes a typical tourist pose at a porthole on the International Space Station, with its notoriously temperamental solar panel array in the background.

In 1961 Yuri Gagarin became the first man to speak from space. Fifty-two years later, Toyota has helped give a voice to the first robot to talk while orbiting the earth.

Toyota "Robonaut" Kirobo's first words echoed Neil Armstrong's iconic moon-landing: "On August 21, 2013, a robot took one small step towards a brighter future for all."

Toyota provided Kirobo's voice recognition software and plans to use experience gained from the orbital experiments to improve the range of interactive conversation technologies it uses in its cars.

Kirobo, just 34cm tall, left earth on 4 August from Japan's Tanegashima Space Centre in the Kounotori 4 cargo vehicle, which docked at the International Space Station after six days in orbit.

CHAT ROOM

Kirobo will be joined later this year by Koichi Wakata, who will become the first Japanese astronaut to take command of the orbiting space station, and will take part in the first conversation between a human and a robot in space, in the Japanese Experiment Module, nicknamed "Kibo" after the Japanese word for hope.

Kirobo and his earth-bound twin Mirata are two humanoid communication robots developed under the Kibo Robot Project, a joint research project between Toyota, Dentsu, Robo Garage, the University of Tokyo's Research Centre for Advanced Science and Technology and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency!

Latest Cassini images of the planet Saturn and it's largest moon 'Titan'!

Here is an image, the spacecraft has sent back to Earth on its incredible mission into space. Above, the Cassini spacecraft sent back this image on August 29, 2012 of Saturn’s indigo and ochre hues undergoing a seasonal change. When Cassini arrived at Saturn in 2004, the planet’s northern hemisphere was bathed in azure blue, but as the years have passed, spring has begun in the Northern hemisphere. The blue has begun to fade, migrating south where winter is fast approaching, as shown in this natural-colour image of the gas giant and its largest moon Titan!

Earth life 'may have originated on Mars'!

Life would face challenges on Mars today, but billions of years ago conditions might have been better

Life may have started on Mars before arriving on Earth, a major scientific conference has heard.

New research supports an idea that the Red Planet was a better place to kick-start biology billions of years ago than the early Earth was.

The evidence is based on how the first molecules necessary for life were assembled.

Details of the theory were outlined by Prof Steven Benner at theGoldschmidt Meeting in Florence, Italy.

Scientists have long wondered how atoms first came together to make up the three crucial molecular components of living organisms: RNA, DNA and proteins.

The molecules that combined to form genetic material are far more complex than the primordial "pre-biotic" soup of organic (carbon-based) chemicals thought to have existed on the Earth more than three billion years ago, and RNA (ribonucleic acid) is thought to have been the first of them to appear.

Simply adding energy such as heat or light to the more basic organic molecules in the "soup" does not generate RNA. Instead, it generates tar.

RNA needs to be coaxed into shape by "templating" atoms at the crystalline surfaces of minerals.

The minerals most effective at templating RNA would have dissolved in the oceans of the early Earth, but would have been more abundant on Mars, according to Prof Benner.

Red or dead?

This could suggest that life started on the Red Planet before being transported to Earth on meteorites, argues Prof Benner, of the Westheimer Institute of Science and Technology in Gainesville, US.

The idea that life originated on Mars and was then transported to our planet has been mooted before. But Prof Benner's ideas add another twist to the theory of a Martian origin for the terrestrial biosphere.

Here in Florence, Prof Benner presented results that suggest minerals containing the elements boron and molybdenum are key in assembling atoms into life-forming molecules.

The researcher points out that boron minerals help carbohydrate rings to form from pre-biotic chemicals, and then molybdenum takes that intermediate molecule and rearranges it to form ribose, and hence RNA.

This raises problems for how life began on Earth, since the early Earth is thought to have been unsuitable for the formation of the necessary boron and molybdenum minerals.

It is thought that the boron minerals needed to form RNA from pre-biotic soups were not available on early Earth in sufficient quantity, and the molybdenum minerals were not available in the correct chemical form.

Prof Benner explained: "It’s only when molybdenum becomes highly oxidised that it is able to influence how early life formed.

"This form of molybdenum couldn’t have been available on Earth at the time life first began, because three billion years ago, the surface of the Earth had very little oxygen, but Mars did.

"It’s yet another piece of evidence which makes it more likely life came to Earth on a Martian meteorite, rather than starting on this planet."

Early Mars is also thought to have had a drier environment, and this is also crucial to its favourable location for life's origins.

"What’s quite clear is that boron, as an element, is quite scarce in Earth’s crust," Prof Benner told BBC News, “but Mars has been drier than Earth and more oxidising, so if Earth is not suitable for the chemistry, Mars might be.

"The evidence seems to be building that we are actually all Martians; that life started on Mars and came to Earth on a rock," he commented.

"It’s lucky that we ended up here, nevertheless - as certainly Earth has been the better of the two planets for sustaining life. If our hypothetical Martian ancestors had remained on Mars, there may not have been a story to tell."

Possibility that a sun's 'twin' could reveal fate of humanity 4 billion years from now!

A distant star thought to be almost identical to our own sun is providing scientists with the chance to see how our solar system will look in four billion years time!

A graphic showing our own sun, which is around 4.6 billion years old, while HIP 102152 is 8.2 billion years old Photo: European Southern Observatory

The star, known as HIP 102152, is considered to be one of the closest “twins” of our Sun that astronomers have found to date, but is considerably older.

Located 250 light years from Earth, scientists now hope to study it to learn how our own sun will age. It has similar temperature, size and chemical composition to our Sun.

The observations, achieved using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope, also suggest that the star may be orbited by rocky planets.

If this turns out to be the case, it could even provide some clues as to our own fate as the solar system gets older.

Jorge Melendez, from the Universidade de Sao Paulo in Brazil who led the team of researchers, said: “ “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.”

Our own sun is around 4.6 billion years old, while HIP 102152 is 8.2 billion years old. Located in the constellation of Capricornus, the astronomers analysed the spectrum of light that came from the star.

^{The Very Large Telescope (VLT) at ESO's Cerro Paranal observing site (European Southern Observatory)}

The spectrum produced by a star acts like an identifying bar code, providing details about its chemical composition and history.

In the big bang large amounts of hydrogen and helium were produced along with light elements such as lithium.

As stars age, this lithium is burned up or destroyed, providing scientists with an ability to tell how old a star is. Our Sun has just one per cent of the lithium that it would have had when it was formed.

The new observations of HIP 102152 have already allowed astronomers to pin down the correlation between a sun-like stars age and its lithium content.

Tala Wanda Monroe, also from the Universidade de São Paulo and another of the researchers, said: “We have found that HIP 102152 has very low levels of lithium.

“This demonstrates clearly for the first time that older solar twins do indeed have less lithium than our own Sun or younger solar twins.

“We can now be certain that stars somehow destroy their lithium as they age, and that the Sun's lithium content appears to be normal for its age.”

The researchers, whose findings are published in the journal Astrophysical Journal Letters, also found an unusual chemical signal that has not yet been found in other solar twins, but has in the sun.

Both HIP 102152 and our Sun contain low levels of elements that are locked up in meteorites and here on Earth. It suggests that HIP 102152 may also have rocky planets.

If this turns out to be the case, it could well reveal what awaits our own solar system in four billion years!

Big Pic: A Soyuz Astronaut's Space Toilet!

Imagine peeing in this.

Space Toilet via @Cmdr_Hadfield

In space, no one can hear you poop. Or at least, probably not, since you're trying really hard not to poop at all. Because this is what you have to go in.

Earlier today former ISS commander Chris Hadfield shared this terrifying picture of what the humble commode looks like on Russia's Soyuz spacecraft via his Facebook page. And, yikes. On the left is what he describes as the "human interface" aspect.

He also shared this fascinating, terrible tidbit of astronaut lore: Before being catapulted into the last frontier, Soyuz astronauts get not one, but TWO enemas. And we thought not doing laundry for months sounded bad!