Thanks 2ndDivisionVet.
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Posted on 03/23/2015 12:44:17 AM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Life on Earth exists becuase of the sun and our distance from it. Without that star and the energy it gives off, we’d be what NASA once described as a “lifeless ball of ice-coated rock.” Luckily, we are far enough from it, and as of right now, it’s not radiating so much light as to make our planet uninhabitable. In some ways, we’re in the sweet spot, and researchers may have discovered many more such connections.
Stars in the Milky Way may have 100 billion planets — two, on average, per star — in their habitable zone, the area far enough from the star to avoid the planet getting scorched but close enough for it to potentially hold liquid water, according to new research from the Australian National University and the Niels Bohr Institute in Denmark.
That number, 100 billion, may seem beyond comprehension, but “this result is actually not controversial,” Steffen Jacobsen, a PhD student in Astrophysics and Planetary Science at Niels Bohr, told weather.com. Previous studies, he said, have predicted tens of billions of these planets. “In that sense, what we find is not surprising. Practically every researcher in the field expects there to be many, many planets in the habitable zone and many, many Earth-like planets.”
The potential for liquid water means the potential for life beyond Earth — assuming, that is, that water is as important to the evolution of life there as it was on our planet. “If you have liquid water, then you should have better conditions for life, we think,” Jacobsen said. “Of course, we don’t know this yet. We can’t say for certain.” Solving that mystery is part of the thrill for researchers looking for extraterrestrial life.
In this case, Jacobsen and colleagues used a theory called the Titius-Bode law for their calculations. They looked at 151 of the nearly 400 planetary systems NASA’s Kepler mission has collected data on, omitting systems with just two planets and focusing on those with four, five or even 10. Put simply, Titius-Bode says that within a single planetary system, a pattern exists in the distance between planets. In other words, “if you know where the four planets lie [in a five-planet system], then you can calculate where the fifth one will lie,” Jacobsen explained.
This is important because right now these planets are purely theoretical, and within the 151 systems, just 77 planets made the researchers’ short list for possibility of actual discovery.
Now it’s up to the field at large to comb through scores of data to determine whether Kepler actually has already spotted some of these planets and we just didn’t know it. “Some of these planets are so small the Kepler team will probably have missed them in the first attempt because the signals we get are so weak. They may be hidden in the noise,” he said. “You may miss them … unless you know where to look and unless you know what to look for.”
That, in a nutshell, is the crux of this work. “Our research indicates that there are a lot of planets in the habitable zone and we know there are a lot of stars like the one we’re looking at. We know that means we’re going to have many billions of planets in the habitable zone,” according to Jacobsen. If that’s true, “that would be very good news for the search for life.”
The research, “Using the inclinations of Kepler systems to prioritize new Titius–Bode-based exoplanet predictions,” was published Wednesday, Mar. 18, 2015 in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
There may be a Goldilocks zone on a vastly greater scale than within a stellar system. A Galactic Goldilocks zone would be posited as residing on the surfaces of galactic arms, clear of choking with dust and gas inimical to the development of life. If this is valid, it would vastly reduce the incidence of, within a larger ring, the development of life, within a narrower ring, the development of intelligent life. This distinction is frequently disregarded in excited announcements of statistical evidence of the presence of possibly life-bearing planets. So far SETI with its myriads of enthusiastic volunteers has not been able to announce any significant, reproducible findings. If it had, we’d be the first to know, through these rather optimistic news items. We are assured by the daily catechism of sci-fi shows that this is a highly likely outcome, and that the residents of other civilizations must surely have an enlightened, secular, hook-up culture. This despite the fact that our own civilization shows signs of decay, as it were, as described by Bubba’s favorite Georgetown Professor, Carroll Quigly of “Tragedy & Hope” and “The Evolution of Civilizations”, demonstrating such civilizational end-stage signs as routine, regularized practice of sexual perversions. Any alien civilization which practices murder of its own children would be unlikely to have survived long enough for SETI to detect it.
I think civilizations eventually 'virtualize'. It's just a matter of time before virtual reality becomes so realistic that people will want to stay there all the time. What does outer space have that can beat creating and living in your own world?
There are a bunch in Washington and Ottawa that I would volunteer for the mission, if that’s any help. They could found the first intergalactic caliphate.
Most because of an ineligible self proclaimed Kenyan. What the hell is wrong with that picture Pelosi?
Thanks 2ndDivisionVet.
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Let’s not polute the rest of the solar system. We could find the planets quite useful for responsible humans.
Why?
We know this is difficult with lightspeed as a hard limit on information transmission. Even with Arecibo doing its thing we’ve been broadcasting for maybe forty years.
Given the gaps, that’s nothing.
What we *can* say is that we’ve not picked up a definitive signal in the electromagnetic spectrum indicating intelligent life elsewhere.
The guesstimate is seriously questionable; the 18th century Titius-Bode Law doesn't even work completely in our solar system with our size of a sun. Furthermore there are many, many other factors necessary for life to be able to exist on a planet.
The article sounds like someone's research grant is up for renewal.
The earth is the center of the universe.
It’s ok to believe in other life or UFO’s as long as none of those could be God.
Pray America is waking
Of course, if there's intelligent life on those planet, maybe they don't want Liberals on their planet...
The universe runs on information and information codes and it is sufficiently obvious that the most basic such code, RNA/DNA, could only be the work of a single pair of hands, and most people call the owner of those hands God.
In an evolved universe that would be correct; however we all known that evolution is a bunch of BS, or at least people who have kept up know that. In a designed universe such as we actually live in, you'd expect to find humans living on other worlds.
“habitable zone” is but one factor among (at least) thousands.
And if each had a generous 10% probability, you’d still have odds equivalent to finding the one specific atom in the universe.
Don’t you understand evolution is settled science. After all we know science has never been wrong.
I teased a libinlaw with that a couple of weeks ago.
“So, I hear butter isn’t bad for you anymore.”
-”well, specifically, it’s the cholesterol that isn’t bad for you”
“Isn’t science amazing? They’re able to change whether something is good for you or bad for you! I just love our super smart scientists - especially the ones that tell everyone to change their lifestyles according to what they KNOW to be true.”
In one little galaxy out of hundreds of trillion trillions...
I like saying science has never been wrong except the Spotted Owl, Acid Rain, the Ozone hole and DDT, so we know we can trust them.
An interesting theory about how that happened (Mars losing its atmosphere and becoming a dead planet) is contained in Worlds in Collision (ca. 1950) by Immanuel Velikovsky.
Whaddaya mean, “wrong”? They’re never wrong.
They just change reality for the betterment of humanity.
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