Posted on 06/24/2020 9:09:55 PM PDT by RomanSoldier19
A new estimate suggests the Milky Way is home to six billion Earth-like planets. So far, we’ve found just one potential candidate.
In 2009, the Kepler space telescope constantly watched over some 200,000 stars in our corner of the Milky Way. It was looking for where life might exist—by pinpointing small, rocky planets in the temperate zones of warm, yellow suns, and figuring out just how special Earth is in the grand scheme of things. While the mission revolutionized the study of exoplanets, those main objectives went largely unfulfilled. A mechanical failure cut short Kepler’s initial survey in 2013. Astronomers would later discover just a single Earthlike planet in its dataset.
A decade later, researchers are finally closing in on some of the answers to the questions Kepler raised. Earthlike planets are probably rare, but not exceedingly so. Roughly one in five yellow stars could have one, according to a new analysis of Kepler’s data published in May in The Astronomical Journal. If the researchers’ conclusions are correct, that would mean the Milky Way might be home to nearly 6 billion Earths. Yet of the 4,000 likely exoplanets we’ve spotted, just one looks anything like our home planet. So where are the rest?
“[Truly Earthlike planets] are not hiding per se, it’s just that the sensitivity of our telescopes is simply not good enough yet [to find them],” says Dirk Schulze-Makuch, an astrobiologist at the Technical University Berlin, Germany, who was not involved with the research.
(Excerpt) Read more at popsci.com ...
It has ceased to amaze me that so many people seem to think that knowledge of the universe is complete.
The distances are so vast that thousands of (Earthling) lifetimes pass between the sending of a message and its receipt and decoding and thousands more before a reply arrives. The first wireless transmissions have only traveled about 100 light years, a tiny fraction of the size of our own galaxy let alone to the next nearest.
https://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2012/3390.html
Look at African and Indian Elephants, Mammoths and a number of varieties of Mastodon. They undoubtedly had a common ancestor, put here by God as part of His creation.
Except live long enough to make the trip.
Exactly.
I think that was the mission for the X-37b. It's my opinion that that spacecraft was used to test stasis in zero-G.
It’s always been that way - at any and every point in history, many people have thought that everything was ‘settled’.
On the upside, there have always been brilliant individuals who have wandered out-of-line and insisted that very little is ‘settled’ at all; and that the notion of ‘settled’ is antithetical to Science itself.
/bingo.
God doesn’t ‘waste space’ - His imagination is too big for such waste.
In recent years, we’ve even found Life inhabiting water so hot on Earth that we had thought no Life could survive in it. It’s probably true of the frozen ‘deserts’, as well.
There are things of enormous portent yet to be discovered.
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