Posted on 05/10/2012 10:10:10 AM PDT by LibWhacker
Researchers say life-bearing planets may exist in vast numbers in the space between stars in the Milky Way
A few hundred thousand billion free-floating life-bearing Earth-sized planets may exist in the space between stars in the Milky Way. So argues an international team of scientists led by Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe, Director of the Buckingham Centre for Astrobiology at the University of Buckingham, UK. Their findings are published online in the Springer journal Astrophysics and Space Science.
The scientists have proposed that these life-bearing planets originated in the early Universe within a few million years of the Big Bang, and that they make up most of the so-called “missing mass” of galaxies. The scientists calculate that such a planetary body would cross the inner solar system every 25 million years on the average and during each transit, zodiacal dust, including a component of the solar system’s living cells, becomes implanted at its surface. The free-floating planets would then have the added property of mixing the products of local biological evolution on a galaxy-wide scale.
Since 1995, when the first extrasolar planet was reported, interest in searching for planets has reached a feverish pitch. The 750 or so detections of exoplanets are all of planets orbiting stars, and very few, if any, have been deemed potential candidates for life. The possibility of a much larger number of planets was first suggested in earlier studies where the effects of gravitational lensing of distant quasars by intervening planet-sized bodies were measured. Recently several groups of investigators have suggested that a few billion such objects could exist in the galaxy. Wickramasinghe and team have increased this grand total of planets to a few hundred thousand billion (a few thousand for every Milky Way star) - each one harbouring the legacy of cosmic primordial life.
[ So , let me get this straight. If we were to drift away from our sun, every phase of all life on earth would be destroyed yet we are supposed to believe that myriads of no sun planets drifting around would be havens for life??? ]
Life would stil be on the earth under large ice sheets that are the oceans there would be plenty of black smoking hydrothermal vents that microbal life would flourish around.
If the rouge planet was a “super earth” it may very well be big enough to both generate enough internal heat and if covered by a thick enough atmosphere keep that internally generated heat in so that you could walk around on it with only needing a shirt and shorts.
It would be a delicate balance, but it is possible to even have a life bearing rougue planet whizzing about with intelligent life on it. Such beings living on it would have big eyes in order to see by “starlight” in stead of needing a sun for vision.
I wonder how many planets out there are orbiting so called Brown dwarfs.
Doesn't bother me a bit. It attempts to define the "known knowns", "known unknowns", and "unknown unknowns". People in general though have no concept of the distances involved in all of our observations, how little we can really see, and even if they DO have some clue about that, how little we know about the nature of time, and the fact that we could meet someone in space but be billions of years apaart in time.
[ Any planet in interstellar space will be a frozen ice ball. ]
Wrong, if it has enough internal heat it would be able to maintain a constant temp. If it were big enough like jupiter there would be areas in the atmosphere where the temp would be room temp.
We have meteors that it is theorized came from Mars.
These meteors have formations that resemble fossilized bacteria.
Even if the formations in the rock are bacteria from Mars it is certainly possible that the bacteria was fossilized prior to leaving Mars or that the fossils formed from bacteria killed in space or on entry in to Earth atmosphere.
It is also possible since we know that bacteria here on Earth live inside of rocks that the formations are bacteria that entered the rocks after the rock came to Earth. (I really don't think this one is likely since the rock fell in Antartica but it is possible)
Have you got a link. I like reading about demons
[ Or that our understanding of how gravity works is incomplete.
I’m perfectly willing to consider the possibility of dark matter, and the even more weird dark energy.
But to assume as a fact the existence of something we cannot see in order to make what we can see fit the theories is not a very scientific approach. ]
The “rubber sheet and marble” analogy of Gravity it WRONG WRONG WRONG!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_well#The_rubber-sheet_model
They forget about what it below the “sheet”.
Ok! thought experiment time:
Take a large kiddie pool and fill it up to the brim with water. Now stretch a sheet of rubber over it and seal it so no air can get in and no water can get out.
NOW place a heave marble in it and observer what happens to the sheet...
It does the same as before but what happens to the outside edge of the sheet.... It RISES!!!!!
That is your so called “Repulsive Dark Energy”
Morons couldn’t understand gravity because their assumption about the dimension below space time is wrong.
[ There are thirteen other planets with highly evolved dominant species like H. Sapiens. Some of them have evolved more along the lines of birds. One is reptilian-based. ]
Interesting, where did you find this out from?
There you go.. get a PHD and your bullshit instantly becomes defecation...
Your dreck becomes interesting attributes of a fine wine..
Carl Sagan said life had to happen somewhere first....
Why not Here..
If it did, Why?... was it planted?.. Is there some adjacent agenda?..
I am thinking of a wild concept..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_DV54ddNHE
I imagine that there are copious examples of about everything that might happen to them happening to them. Lots of them would stray too close to a star and be diverted out of the primary galactic orbit.
But once in a galaxy, it might be much more difficult to get pitched out, rather than curved back in. And certain parts of the galaxy with major black holes would be planet traps. Supernovas could knock them off trajectory as well.
They are a long-time, highly respected publisher of graduate level textbooks in mathematics. I have a number of their books that we used when I was in grad school. I had no idea they had branched out into publishing news articles in science (and apparently business, judging by the header) until I stumbled across this article today. I’ve bookmarked it and will be checking it regularly. Definitely a keeper.
I wouldn't downplay the importance of creating theories about how physical systems work.
Just to use the "aether" as an example, I believe that the Michelson-Morley experiment was intended to measure the velocity of the earth as it traveled through the aether.
Light beams were emitted in a pattern which caused the light to travel two different paths, with a portion of the two paths at right angles to each other. The experiment was repeated at different times of year, so that the movement of the solar system through the aether could also be detected.
The surprising result was that light was not a wave traveling through a stationary aether. The speed of the light was unaffected by the position or velocity of the earth. Both beams arrived simultaneously, indicating that the light was not propagating through a fixed aether.
The aether theory contained within its details the possibility of falsifiability; that is, it was possible to design an experiment that could prove that the aether theory was false.
If only the so-called "scientists" supporting global warming believed in such a concept. From what I have read, these "scientists" seem unfazed by the fact that the upper atmosphere fails to show the warming predicted by all the computer models. To a real scientist, any model which predicts upper atmosphere warming must be rejected as false. It's really not any more complicated than that.
Which other bodies in the Solar System have a lithosphere and atmosphere whose isotopic composition are virtually identical to Mars and the SNC group of meteorites?
Which other bodies in the Solar System have a lithosphere and atmosphere whose isotopic composition are virtually identical to Mars and the SNC group of meteorites?
Sorry... I think I got it from Ancient Aliens. :)
Electrical energy flows into the Earth at the poles. This ‘flow’ is what produces the Ozone layer. The holes are self-regulating and control the flow. So... if massive amounts of energy flow into the Earth at the poles, where does it go and what does it do?
My guess would be that I am right, and you are right, and 'it' happens in some ways we can't even imagine.
It is 'possible' in an 'infinite' universe for 'everything' to happen.
Most solar systems are likely a mixture of 'created' and 'captured' planets.
For instance, it has been accepted that most planets in our Solar System are 'created'. However, Uranus may have been captured. It has a vertical rotation, rather than horizontal like the rest.
My main point was that matter surrounding a star would become stratified like the rings around planets, and if that is true, then it would help explain the makeup of the different planets in a solar system.
Life is vast, and abundant, and we really understand little about it.
Similarly, the Universe is on such a scale that it is difficult for humans to even imagine. The Oort Cloud and the Asteroid belt look like a full crowd during a rock concert at a football stadium, from an overhead view. However, the scale is such that once on the ground, you could walk from one end of the stadium to the other, and never see another person.
Gravity and magnetism. Yet our 'science' is built around their behavior.
I’m perfectly willing to consider the possibility of dark matter, and the even more weird dark energy.
I think that planets with no 'star' would be 'dark', and that explains the 'missing' matter.
Dark energy? I would suggest that 'dark energy' was just a theory used to explain why the galaxy mass/gravitational pull calculations didn't work out. As it turns out, they are seeing that there is just a lot more 'mass' lying around than they had ever imagined, or could see.
But to assume as a fact the existence of something we cannot see in order to make what we can see fit the theories is not a very scientific approach.
Well... it's worked for thousands of years (or billions, who knows).
As reliable as the Washington Post for political articles.
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