On 28 August, Jorge Melendez stepped into a room full of journalists to announce a remarkable discovery: an 8.2-billion-year-old star that was depleted in elements such as iron and aluminium in almost exactly the same way as the Sun D a hint that the older star could host terrestrial planets. In an age when astronomers are obsessed with finding another Earth, Melendez had found something nearly as exciting: a solar twin. Even more significant than the discovery were its circumstances. Melendez, an astronomer at the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil, had found the star using an elite telescope that belongs to the European Southern Observatory (ESO) D a sign of a functioning, if fragile, transatlantic co-dependency.
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