Hear the word Stardust and it's likely you'll think of that 2007 fantasy film. You know the one – it stars Claire Danes as a fallen star and Michelle Pfeiffer as a witch in search of her youthful glow... And also features Robert De Niro? The voice of Ian McKellen? Sienna Miller?
Anyway, even if you don't think of it (a brilliant film though), it's unlikely what you'll think of instead is, err, yourself. And everyone else. And the whole planet.
But this might have to change. Because scientists now claim they have discovered we are, all of us, part-alien.
Following a study which used 3D computer simulations to chart the formation of galaxies after the Big Bang to now, US astrophysicists have concluded that more than 50% of what makes up our galaxy, the Milky Way, might have originated from others.
Yes, yes, those ones 'far, far away'.
The idea is that when stars explode, the force is such, it can propel atoms lightyears away, across the universe and into other galaxies.
Sort of blows your mind, doesn't it?
Daniel Angles-Alcazar, leader of the study at Northwestern University’s astrophysics center, told CNN: 'We ran highly sophisticated simulations, looking at the formation of galaxies from shortly after the Big Bang and traced their development to today.'
He added, 'We found that when we completed these simulations that we could say ... that the atoms which formed the solar system and so which form us, may have existed in other galaxies.'
So basically, we all come from outer space. Cool, no?
The study's findings were published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Journal and of them, Assistant Professor Claude-André Faucher-Giguère (of the Weinberg College of Arts and Science in Illinois) told The Telegraph 'The study transforms our understanding of how galaxies formed from the Big Bang.
'...Our origins are much less local than we previously thought. This study gives us a sense of how things around us are connected to distant objects in the sky.'
Adds a totally different dimension to stargazing, doesn't it?