Posted on 01/11/2012 11:05:37 AM PST by presidio9
A statistical analysis based on a survey of millions of stars suggests that there's at least one planet for every star in the sky, and probably more. That would add up to 160 billion planets or so in the Milky Way.
"We conclude that stars are orbited by planets as a rule, rather than the exception," an international research team reports today in the journal Nature.
The estimate may sound amazing: Just a year ago, the world was wowed by the claim that at least half of the 100 billion or more stars in the Milky Way possessed planets, yielding a figure of 50 billion planets. The latest survey now suggests that there's an average of 1.6 planets per star system, which would work out to 160 billion. But perhaps the most amazing thing about the findings is ... astronomers don't find them amazing at all.
"I am not surprised by the numbers," Didier Queloz, a planet-hunter at the Geneva Observatory who was not involved in the survey, told me in an email. Back in 2008, Queloz was part of a different research team that concluded one-third of the stars like our sun harbored super-Earth-size planets — the kinds of planets that could support life.
Over the past couple of years, findings from a variety of planet-hunting missions — including NASA's Kepler space telescope, the European Space Agency's COROT telescope and ground-based telescope surveys — have reinforced the view that planets are plentiful.
"Resiuts from the three main techniques of planet detection are rapidly converging to a common result: Not only are planets common in the galaxy, but there are more small planets than large ones," Caltech astronomer Stephen Kane, a member of the team behind the findings reported in Nature,
(Excerpt) Read more at cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com ...
Feynman said we should stop using the term astronomical numbers when describing huge numbers. He pointed out that political numbers masse more sense,,, that they are much bigger.
You are a fluke
Of the universe.
You have no right to be here.
And whether you can hear it or not
The universe is laughing behind your back.
All those potential habitats for life and nobody has bothered to say hello. That’s the Fermi paradox.
Maybe we smell bad.
The more planets they find, the more miraculous our existence. All those millions of planets and not one are sending out radio waves proclaiming intelligent life.
We’re still the only planet with chocolate.
Maybe we can send an ambassador to some of those planets to ask for some loans for our Federal debt.
I’m thinking it was Sagan, but it may have been someone else, who was asked several decades ago what they believed would be the most amazing discovery in the history of mankind. He replied ‘To discover that we are alone after all.”
I dispute their assessment:
1. Planets have been observed only near stars that are relatively close to us. We live in a part of the galaxy that is rather sparsely populated by stars.
2. In the center of the galaxy, and to a lesser extent in the spiral arms, the star density is considerably higher. Stars are much closer to each other, making planetary orbits less stable. The majority of the stars are located in these denser areas.
3. To the best of my knowledge, there are only a small handful of planets observed in double-star systems. This may be because they would be difficult to observe in a multiple-star system, but it may also be due to orbital instability in multiple star systems.
The assessment presented here is way too simplistic, and likely overestimates the number of planets by a significant amount.
They don't have a clue if these planets could support life. They only know the planets are there the "wobble" effect in the star created by the planet's gravitation effect. Thus, the general mass of the planet and it's distance from the star is all they know. Scientists have shown that there are at least 23 finely tuned conditions of the earth which are absolutely necessary to support life. This includes things like the exact composition of the atmosphere, the very narrow temperature range, gravitational forces on the surface, tilt of the axis, etc. etc. The probability of even 15 of these conditions all being present on any given planet are more than 10 to the -256 power against it. Such a large improbability is generally considered an impossibility.
On the contrary, I’d suggest these results provide more support for the Anthropic Principle, and the “perfect” conditions for intelligent life in our solar system could well simply be the random result of having 160 billion shots at achieving those conditions just in our galaxy alone.
Well they very well could be sending out signals, but we’re only monitoring the section of carrier waves we actually use (which is about 10%) and most of these planets are far enough away that if the first thing we’d done after we invented radio transmission and aim it at space our signals wouldn’t even be halfway there yet assuming it even managed to have enough strength to still be readable. Light speed is actually pretty slow when you get to celestial distances, and void is really hard on any and all forms of transmission.
They already did, "Send More Chuck Berry!"
Considering the number of planets in the universe, there are probable planets with vast oceans of chocolate, with clouds of whip cream, and tangerine trees...wait....
When do they compile a list of every planet, named and described?
I think we need more computers and more telescopes...maybe a telescope on the far side of the moon.
“Feeling small yet?”
When I have someone barking about something I show them the “You are here” picture of the Milky Way.
That’s probably because the waves they are sending out, are so far in advance of ours, that we don’t even know how to recognise them. Sort of like trying to explain how a tv works, to a sea slug.
Habitable planets catalog (They do point out that the planets listed are only theoretically habitable)
http://phl.upr.edu/projects/habitable-exoplanets-catalog
I've felt that way for a very long time.
I took this shot of M-16 Eagle Nebula not long ago. It's about 7,000 light years distance from our tiny planet.
Ya see those dark pillars near the center of the nebula?
The height/length of these pillar is approximately 24 trillion miles high....
That's "trillion" with a T.
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