'Nothing special about our Sun'
22 May 2008, 0004 hrs IST,PTI

MELBOURNE: Astronomers claim to have found evidence that there is nothing special about the Sun, a finding which adds weight to the idea that life could be common in the universe.

An international team, led by planetary scientists from the Australian National University, compared the sun -which hosts a life-bearing planet -to other stars to reach their conclusion.

"Our research goes further than previous work which only looked at single properties such as mass or iron content. We looked at 11 properties that could plausibly be connected with life and did an analysis of these properties.

"We found that the upshot is that there doesn't seem to be anything special about the sun. It seems to be a random star that was blindly pulled out of the bag of all stars," according to the leader of the team, Jose Robles.

The astronomers found that the Sun's mass is the most anomalous of its properties; the Sun is more massive than 95% of stars. The Sun's orbit around the centre of the galaxy is also more circular than the orbits of 93% of its peers.

"But when analysing the 11 properties together, the sun shows up as a star selected at random, rather than one selected for some life-enhancing property," Robles was quoted by the 'Astrophysical Journal' as saying.

Added co-researcher Charley Lineweaver: "Those who are searching for justification for their beliefs that terrestrial life and humanity in particular are special, will probably interpret this result as a humiliating dethronement.