Posted on 04/03/2013 6:26:05 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
Less than two decades ago, there were exactly zero known planets orbiting sunlike stars in our Milky Way galaxy. Astronomers back then were engaged in a powerful struggle to seek out exoplanets, and they succeeded, so that today there are 861 confirmed exoplanets, according to exoplanet.eu on March 25, 2013... astronomers at The University of Auckland in New Zealand announced their new method for finding exoplanets. They say they anticipate 100 billion planets similar to our Earth, orbiting stars in the Milky Way...
Lead author of the New Zealand planet search -- Dr. Phil Yock from the University of Auckland’s Department of Physics -- said his team’s strategy is to use a gravitational microlensing technique. Yock said his team will use a combination of data from microlensing and NASA’s Kepler space telescope.
The Kepler space telescope, by the way, has single-handedly found 105 exoplanets and an astounding 2,740 planet candidates orbiting 2,036 stars (as of January 7, 2013)...
Kepler finds Earth-sized planets that are quite close to parent stars, and it estimates that there are 17 billion such planets in the Milky Way. These planets are generally hotter than Earth, although some could be of a similar temperature (and therefore habitable) if they’re orbiting a cool star called a red dwarf...
Microlensing, used by the New Zealand astronomers, is a third technique for finding planets orbiting distant suns. It measures the deflection of light from a distant star that passes through a planetary system en route to Earth. This effect was predicted by Einstein in 1936 and has been used successfully not only to find exoplanets but also to study distant objects such as quasars...
(Excerpt) Read more at earthsky.org ...
Tough equation, when you know hardly any of the variables. Anyone got even a glimpse of the number?
"Habitable" only comes when there is oxygen in the atmosphere, lots of clean water, temperatures that remain as stable as that of this good earth, and plants capable of sustaining animal life, as well as humans.
My bet - there is no other place like this place.
That is an obviously flawed equation being there is no variable for comet seeding.
I remember Carl Sagan said the same thing in 1980’s “Cosmos” as he demonstrated the Frank Drake Equation that was developed at Green Bank in the 1950’s. BTW, I did a little research and there was a time in 1942 when an astronomer thought he might have discovered an extra-solar planet by seeing how something was tugging at the star he was observing.
Our galaxy is estimated to have between 200 million and 400 million stars. I’d say that the NZ astronomers are giving a pretty conservative estimate considering how many we’ve found in a fairly limited search area.
100 billion planets...and none of them has chocolate.
What about Mars bars?
A hundred billion planets in our galaxy and we are stuck here on the one with Zero.
Not very many years ago, they said the exact same thing about the Moon, Mars and sending spacecraft outside of our solar system...In fact they said that about crossing the oceans not too many years ago.
Not long ago, they also imprisoned people who dared suggest earth was not the center of the universe...
“I also have no doubt a good percentage of those will harbor some type of life.”
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I don’t know that a good percentage have life, but I imagine
there is life, other then on Earth, somewhere the universe.
I do not, however, believe that we are, or have been visited
by ET. He has to be just too far away.
They also don’t have and will ever have Moslems
They can’t pray towards Mecca when it’s 500+ light years away
Somewhere between Zero and a billion, I’d guess.
That’s true — but, you could say that comment seeding is a (possible) causal variable embedded in “fi”. Or, you could just guess.
fi = The fraction of life bearing planets on which intelligent life emerges.
We don’t know. The earth is 4.5 billion or so years old...We have no idea what or who might have visited here long before man’s short time on this planet.
We all have our beliefs or opinions and on that one, I really have no hard opinion either way. Maybe, or maybe not would be my opinion regarding being visited.
"Obviously, our estimates of the number of intelligent species currently residing in our galaxy with technological capacity comparable to or greater than our own varies wildly. That is simply because even our best guesses for each of the pieces in Drake's equation are still just guesses. A number larger than one indicates the number of civilizations currently estimated to exist in the galaxy among its hundreds of billions of stars. The most optimistic number we came up with today is 1000, which is still only 1 per hundred million stars - the proverbial needle in a haystack. The pessimistic numbers (those less than one) suggest that on average, there is no such civilization present in the galaxy. We qualify as one, so this implies that our civilization is a rare and transient phenomenon." From Here.
Drake Equation Calculator Here. I did various values and got answers from below 1 to 80.
I would agree with that.
“The earth is 4.5 billion or so years old...”
You’ve really gone and done it now!
lol...
Thanks. As Sagan said “Either we are alone or we are not. Either way is amazing” or something to that effect.
And I can see your point being that the formation of any (solar) system probably follows a pattern vis-à-vis Oort clouds and the like.
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