This Woman Actually Registered the Sun in Her Name Through a Local Notary
A Spanish woman walked into a local notary’s office in 2010 and walked out claiming ownership of the Sun. Wildly enough, the paperwork looked official enough to start a years-long legal headache involving international treaties, online sales, and a fight with eBay over solar real estate.
Maria Angeles Duran, a resident of Vigo in Spain’s Galicia region, managed to turn one of the internet’s strangest ideas into a legitimate court case. She insisted she had done her homework, studied the law carefully, and found a loophole nobody else had bothered to use first.
That loophole was inside the 1967 Outer Space Treaty. The agreement blocked countries from claiming celestial bodies, but according to Duran, it never clearly said that private citizens could not. This became the foundation of her argument and the reason her story spread beyond Spain.
First, The Paperwork
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Duran officially registered the Sun through a local notary after learning that an American man, Dennis Hope, had already claimed ownership of the Moon and several planets years earlier. She argued that if someone could attempt to register the Moon, there was nothing stopping her from doing the same thing with the Sun.
The document she received described the Sun in surprisingly technical terms. It reportedly identified it as “a star of spectral type G2” located at the center of the solar system, roughly 149.6 million kilometers away from Earth.
Duran later explained that she had consulted legal institutions before filing the claim. She repeatedly defended the idea in interviews, saying she understood the law and acted within it. She also pointed out that anyone else could have tried first, but nobody did.
Her Plan Went Beyond a Joke
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Most bizarre ownership stories stop after the headline, but Duran pushed hers much further. She openly discussed charging companies that benefited from solar energy. According to reports at the time, she even met with representatives from Spain’s industry ministry to discuss potential fees for photovoltaic plants.
Her argument relied on fairness. If companies could profit from shared natural resources, she believed she should also profit as the registered owner of the Sun. Duran also claimed she had a distribution plan for the money. Half would go to the Spanish government, while portions would support pensions, hunger relief, and scientific research. She planned to keep 10 percent for herself.
Then eBay Came In
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Duran eventually started selling plots of the Sun online for around €1 per square meter. The listings reportedly attracted hundreds of buyers curious enough to spend a dollar or two on a piece of solar property. According to later reports, she received around 600 orders.
That success created another problem. eBay eventually shut down her account after suspecting the listings could be misleading or fraudulent. Duran responded by filing a lawsuit against the company. In 2015, reports revealed that a Spanish court had allowed the case to proceed. She claimed eBay took commission fees while blocking her ability to collect payments tied to the sales.
At one point, she reportedly sought about €10,000 in damages. The court avoided answering the biggest question hanging over the entire story: could someone actually own the Sun? Instead, the case focused more narrowly on the business dispute between Duran and the auction platform.
The Story Ended In Legal Limbo
After that, the story slowly lost momentum. No major court ruling officially recognized her as the owner of the Sun, and no government or international organization backed the claim either. Reports about the lawsuit eventually dried up, and there was never a widely publicized victory that turned her paperwork into legitimate ownership rights.
For a while, Duran continued to appear in interviews defending the idea and insisting she had found a real loophole in international law. But over time, the case became more of an internet curiosity than an active legal battle. The paperwork, the lawsuit, and the headlines existed, but none of them actually gave one person control over the Sun.