The Copernican Principle has been with us for centuries. It broadly states that "we are typical" but increasingly we are beginning to question this doctrine. One famous push back is the Rare Earth hypothesis, but testing this idea will take generations. What about our Sun? Surely here we should have a better understanding as to whether our star is typical or not. Join us as we discuss why the Sun might be more special than Copernicus ever imagined. Written and presented by Prof Kipping This video is based on research conducted at the Cool Worlds Lab at Columbia University, New York. You can now support our research program directly here: https://www.coolworldslab.com/support *Correction, Copernicus was Polish! Thank-you to Kevin Clark, Denny Smith, Stephanie Hackley, Kolos Kantor for their support and especially to Executive Producers Tom Widdowson, Laura Sanborn & Mark Sloan. References ► Ward & Brownlee, 2010, Rare Earth, Copernicus (Göttingen) ► Gilliland et al., 2010, Kepler Mission Stellar and Instument Noise Properties, ApJS, 197, 6: https://arxiv.org/abs/1107.5207 ► Maehara et al., 2012, Superflares on solar-type stars, Nature, 485, 478: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature11063 ► Tu et al., 2020, Superflares on solar-type stars from the first year observation of TESS, ApJ, 890, 46: https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.11572 ► Reinhold et al., 2020, The Sun is less active than other solar-like stars, Science, 368, 518: https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.01401 ► Eric Mamajek spectral classifications: http://www.pas.rochester.edu/~emamajek/EEM_dwarf_UBVIJHK_colors_Teff.txt ► Kroupa, 2002, The Initial Mass Function of Stars: Evidence for Uniformity in Variable Systems, Science, 295, 82: https://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0201098 Video materials ► Earth video credit to NASA/ESA/M.Kornmesser: https://www.eso.org/public/videos/earth_2015_4k/ ► Galaxies fly through Sloan SDSS/BOSS/Berkeley Lab: https://youtu.be/08LBltePDZw ► Flying into a galaxy by أحمد الح