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 ...
They’re out there and they’re too new to see.
They’re there and they’re long gone.
Space is a bitch.
Interesting.
Thanks for the link.
Time. No one knows how long a technological civilization lasts. The 300 - 400,000 civilizations may have happened 100 million years ago or a 100 million years in the future.
Technology: An earth type planet could get stuck at the dinosaur stage forever. Or even if intelligent beings evolve they could get stuck at the Roman Empire technology level for ever. No guarantee that they will ever discover radio or space travel.
When the SETI program was being discussed years ago, the expectation was where ever we aimed our equipment we’d find life. Carl Sagan felt the universe would be filled with voices and chatter... just waiting for us to join the conversation.
Then there was nothing. And more nothing... and it became kinda scary.
Agree. A curious thing, that we have discovered fossilized remains of hundreds of types of dinosaurs from hundreds of millions of years ago. Yet we can't find fossilized remains of human missing links over the last few hundred thousand years ago.
On the other hand, imagine how smart we would look trying to “hide our intelligence” from imaginary beings.
sponsored a guy working on it. “space” distortion experiments where on atomic level ,,,
cant wait to get off the planet:
also nasa is already on it...
plus
Ben Rich Lockheed Skunk Works Director
2 : “We already have the means to travel among the stars, but these technologies are locked up in black projects, and it would take an act of God to ever get them out to benefit humanity. Anything you can imagine, we already know how to do.”
but that is another rabbit hole to go through
Unless a universal law of biology says all advanced civilizationS destroy themselves before they develop interstellar communications or travel.
Jeez.
The Universe appears to be infinite. Unless you’ve found some ‘wall’ that we run up against, how in the world can you think that they all should have reached out and ‘found’ us? Many could be at the same level of tech that we are now. Others could be hundreds of years behind us.
And others could be so far ahead of us, that they are attempting to communicate in ways we can’t even recognize - or don’t try because they just Don’t Care!
Yes, that is what I think. The premise is wrong to begin with.
A yellow star is a G-type main-sequence star; our Sun is one of these. Yellow stars have a solar mass of 0.8–1.2 M ☉ and a surface temperature of approximately 5,000–6,000 K. In the image below you can see all the stellar types and their colors, and minimum and maximum radii.
This is just the Milky Way not the entire Galaxy.
....................................
The Milky Way is a Galaxy, in and of itself. We and our solar system are a very small portion of it.
Or dog missing links or snake missing links or bear missing links or crab missing links or ANY of the links... Human, animal.. plant .whatever. NONE. There aren’t any.
You are right. I just realized my mistake while reading my post again. I meant the Universe.
And “chemist” in that context is “drug store” or “pharmacy” in US English.
They are in hiding?
who in their right mind would want to come here
Probably, all those other earths know about the insanity that goes on here and don’t want any part of our crap.
The nice thing about astronomy is, it doesn't purport to use ESP.
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........... Because they are all here ..... Paradox ....
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