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 ...
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All that extra land to be had. :-)
I don’t think most people understand the gravity of this situation.
And that’s just in our galaxy.
Only 100 billion? Hell we’ve got a 13 trillion deficit. And I’m supposed to be impressed by 100 billion?
Dibs!
pig
I have no doubt there are many, many trillions of planets orbiting star systems all over the universe..I also have no doubt a good percentage of those will harbor some type of life.
And they are all clean out of reach
Anyone know what the most realistic Drake equation predicts?
Uh, that number is for our galaxy alone....
There are hundreds of billions, likely trillions of galaxies in the universe...
lol...
I got no beef with Baron.
We now have some key data to plug into the Drake Equation.
N = R* • fp • ne • fl • fi • fc • L
http://www.seti.org/drakeequation
And the US military shall police every single one
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