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To help you comprehend how far Titan is from Earth, Mark suggests imagining Earth scaled down to about 13 centimetres in diameter approximately the size of a large ball in your hand. Titan has rivers, lakes, and even rain. These are not made out of water, but of liquid hydrocarbons at an astonishingly low temperature of negative degrees Celcius.

However, the environment on astronomical bodies such as Titan is radically different to that of Earth and if we were to find life there, it would be unfamiliar to anything that we have ever seen or could predict. The Universe is an unfathomably expansive and empty place. Stars are few and far between, which makes them difficult to explore.

Because the celestial bodies that we observe are so far away that it takes the light from those objects millions of years to reach our detection devices. The light that we observe was emitted from the objects in the distant past, so when we study space we are really looking back in time.

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If we look out far enough we can actually capture a glimpse of what could be considered the beginning of time , and maybe understand the events that constitute the birth of our Universe. In , ESA launched a satellite called Gaia , which was designed to measure the positions and distances of one billion different stars in the Milky Way galaxy.

The technology in Gaia is so advanced and its instruments so precise, that it can measure the width of a human hair over kilometres away. What ESA hopes to do with Gaia is to develop a model of how all of the stars move in the sky and plot their trajectories into the future. They could use the data to generate a movie, and then run that movie backwards to try and figure out where all of the stars came from and how the galaxy might have formed.

What the scientists at ESA noticed when looking through the data gathered by Gaia, is that a particular star given the name Gliese had no noticeable lateral movement. Upon further observation, what they found was that Gliese was in fact heading directly towards our solar system.