It's a wonder of our star that it's managed to keep up this phenomenal rate of energy production for millennia.

Stars like the sun are incredibly long-lived and stable.

Our best estimate for the age of the universe is 13.73 billion years, and the sun has been around for five billion years of that. That's more than a third the age of the universe itself.

So what possible power source could allow the sun to shine with such intensity day after day for five billion years?

The best way to find the answer is to go back to the very beginning. And it all began from, well, pretty much nothing.

There was a time when this corner of the galaxy was without light. The sun had yet to begin.

The story of how our star was born can be read in the night sky.

If you take a picture of the Milky Way, then one of the first things you notice are these dark lines, these dark clouds running through it, an absence of stars and, in fact, those dark areas are called molecular clouds.

They're clouds of molecular hydrogen and dust that are lying in between us and the stars of the Milky Way galaxy.

These dark clouds contain the raw material from which stars are made -- vast stellar nurseries that are amongst the coldest and most isolated places in the galaxy.