José A. Robles

The PhysOrg article Twinkle, twinkle, any star — Sun not so special said

ANU astronomers have found there is nothing special about the Sun after conducting the most comprehensive comparison of it with other stars — adding weight to the idea that life could be common in the universe.
 
Scientists have long argued about whether or not the Earth has some special characteristics that led to the evolution of life. PhD researcher Jose Robles and Dr Charley Lineweaver from the Planetary Science Institute at ANU contend that this is a difficult question to answer because we don’t have information about other Earth-like planets.
 
“Our research goes further than previous work which only looked at single properties such as mass or iron content,” says Robles, who is the lead author on the research paper. “We looked at 11 properties that could plausibly be connected with life and did an analysis of these properties: 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.”

José A. Robles is a PhD researcher at The Research School of Astronomy & Astrophysics (RSSA) and the Planetary Science Institute (PSI) at the Australian National University (ANU).
 
His PhD research is concentrating on the bulk composition of terrestrial planets. He is investigating how the chemical elemental abundances fractionate during planets’ formation. He is also completing a statistic comparison of the Sun and stellar parameters.
 
José coauthored Core-collapse Supernovae in Dwarf Irregular Galaxies, A comprehensive comparison of the Sun to other stars: searching for self-selection effects, HD98618: A Star Closely Resembling Our Sun, Is the Sun a Random Star?, Towards a Classification System of Terrestrial Planets, and Solar System Abundances Pattern.
 
Listen to his interview on ABC NewsRadio. Read New solar twin could shed light on another Earth. Read his LinkedIn profile.