Woman in Spain now Owns the Sun

A woman that says she's taking advantage of international law has staked a claim on the sun.

You know that big red ball of fire in the sky that heats you up on a hot day and appears useless but still keeps you alive on a cold one? Yeah, the Sun? Well, that 4.5 billion year old star now has a new owner, and it isn't god, so get ready for a huge increase in your heating bill. Angeles Duran of Spain, 49, recently filed for and was granted what she says is legal ownership of the Sun.

The U.N.'s Outer Space Treaty states that "outer space is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means." Duran says this means that countries cannot claim celestial bodies, but individuals are still free to do so. She apparently registered ownership of the Sun with a local notary public and is now in possession of an official document that states she is the "owner of the Sun, a star of spectral type G2, located in the centre of the solar system, located at an average distance from Earth of about 149,600,000 kilometres."

Duran's claim is similar to one made decades ago. Dennis Hope did the same thing as Duran in 1980, but with the Moon. Hope has actually earned money off of his claim by selling acres of land on the Moon to rubes, generating millions of dollars, though it might not be as easy for Duran to do the same thing. Who the hell wants to own something that'll burn you from millions of miles away? Neither claim is officially recognized by the U.N.

via The Escapist : News : Woman Claims to Own the Sun.

My favorite comment so far comes from ATS:

reply posted on 26-11-2010 @ 04:54 PM by ENGLISH BOB
I think she'll regret it when the skin cancer lawsuits come rolling in.  ... I think she might also be liable for providing everyone with health and safety info as regards her sun, and possibly providing everyone with free sunblock.

With great power comes great responsibility. The cancer lawsuits may be dwarfed by this: Some believe her Sun will eventually swell up and eat the earth.  In response to a question, Would our Sun really eat the Earth, Brandon on Metafilter had this reply:

The sun is big. It eats whatever it wants. If it wants to get bigger (and it will, all young suns are like that), then it'll pull the inner planets into it without breaking sweat. ... We are the sun's bitch.

She may be able to fend this one off, however, since an astronomer disagrees that her sun will eat us. Reason: As stars get bigger when becoming red giants, they experience a rapid loss of mass.  According to Astronomy Professor Richard W. Pogge, almost 46% of the Sun's original mass will be gone and in response, the remaining planets will move away.  Venus to 1.22 AU and Earth to 1.69 AU.  One AU is the current average distance of the Earth from the sun. Well, formally, an AU is ...

"the radius of an unperturbed circular orbit a massless body would revolve about the sun in 2*(pi)/k days (i.e., 365.2568983.... days), where k is defined as the Gaussian constant exactly equal to 0.01720209895. Since an AU is based on radius of a circular orbit, one AU is actually slightly less than the average distance between the Earth and the Sun (approximately 150 million km or 93 million miles)." (NASA)

The important point is that the Earth and Venus will not be engulfed after all.

Ironic that it is a woman named "Angeles" who legally owns the sun god of many names: Horus, RA, Helios, Titan, Apollo, Svarog, Mitra, Sol Invictus, and "the light of the world". Here is the baseball card for our middle aged sun, often considered a god among the other stars.

Age:	4.55 Billion Years
Mass:	1 Msun = 1.99x1033 g
Radius:	1 Rsun = 700,000 km
Luminosity:	1 Lsun = 3.83x1026 Watts
Temperature:	5779 K
Fuel Supply:	50% of the core Hydrogen has been consumed.