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 ...
Now you're talking! There was a Simpson's cartoon where Homer was in an alternate reality and it was raining donuts. I could go for a planet like that!
All those potential habitats for life and nobody has bothered to say hello. That’s the Fermi paradox.
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The distances are of far greater magnitude than is our entire existence so far.
By what method can they observe *things* before light from the *things* is detected?
“and void is really hard on any and all forms of transmission.”
Yup. I remember reading a paper that basically said any information in a radio signal is basically washed out within a few parsecs. That’s not even accounting for whatever effect vacuum energy (proven to exist recently by turning a virtual particle into a real one) would do to that information.
That means its hopeless. If a vacuum degrades a radio signal that much, what does it do to the visible spectrum? This is like trying to use a flashlight to see the bottom of a muddy pond.
“That means its hopeless. If a vacuum degrades a radio signal that much, what does it do to the visible spectrum? This is like trying to use a flashlight to see the bottom of a muddy pond.”
Dunno. Please note though that even with radio signals, the carrier wave is still there. The information content is at a much lower frequency and has a much lower magnitude. That’s the “information content” that gets washed out.
For example, the information on a 100,000,000 (100 MHz — that’s 100 on your radio dial) Hertz radio signal has a frequency of only a few thousand Hertz at most. That’s the part that gets washed out.
Visible light has a frequency of hundreds of terahertz (e.g., 500,000,000,000,000 Hertz) — another million times higher of a frequency. I don’t know if information encoded in light would be washed out the same way as it is with radio signals.
3 planets found that are smaller than earth.
http://www.space.com/14201-smallest-alien-planets-kepler-telescope-aas219.html
none are remotely habitable but finding them at all is a big deal.
Here is a site that helps explain.
Famous Space Pillars Feel the Heat of Star's Explosion
A new, striking image from Spitzer shows the intact dust towers next to a giant cloud of hot dust thought to have been scorched by the blast of a star that exploded, or went supernova. Astronomers speculate that the supernova's shock wave could have already reached the dusty towers, causing them to topple about 6,000 years ago. However, because light from this region takes 7,000 years to reach Earth, we won't be able to capture photos of the destruction for another 1,000 years or so.
Astronomers have long predicted that a supernova blast wave would mean the end for the popular pillars. The region is littered with 20 or so stars ripe for exploding, so it was only a matter of time, they reasoned, before one would blow up. The new Spitzer observations suggest one of these stellar time bombs has in fact already detonated, an event humans most likely witnessed 1,000 to 2,000 years ago as an unusually bright star in the sky.
For much more:
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/spitzer/news/spitzer-20070109.html
It’s not hopeless, it just means we’re looking in a way that’s very limited. Nobody really figures we’d get an actual message over SETI, we’re just hoping for some sort of regular modulation that implies deliberate action, thousands of years ago. Part of exploring will be to find a better way to communicate, much like we’ll have to find a better way to travel. Astronomical distances are... well astronomical. Hopefully there’s a short cut, there’s plenty of theories, sadly we aren’t putting much work into verifying them. One of them might work, and then the whole game changes.
“If there are any semi-tropical locations with a earth atmosphere ..beam me up!”
The good news is that there’s a tropical planet of fifteen-foot blue women. The bad news is that they are liberal ecofeminists.
nuke it from orbit!
It comes back to what I posted earlier
We need more computers and more telescopes(by an order of magnitude)
And I suppose more particle accelerators and more physicists.
Somebody needs to figure out a way to transmit a measurable nothingness across a space composed of nothing and make it arrive before it left...and be able to observe and prove that it happened. It will require manipulating something that is neither matter nor energy to achieve it.
We've only been "listening" for a few decades and haven't even begun to come close to scratching the surface considering the sheer numbers of planets out there.
And then there's the Wow! Signal so maybe we have heard something...
Actually it’ll probably be easier to figure out how to transmit stuff, a ship, in a way that cheats the light speed problem first. Transmitting stuff is almost always easier than transmitting nothing, when there’s stuff we can include measuring devices to figure out the thing we’re transmitting in. That’s why submarines came before sonar, sonar seems easier, but you have to understand how things work underwater first, and the best way to find that out is to be underwater.
Normally I would agree with you, but it seems the one we got thinks he's a god already.
Excellent job! I’m working on perfecting a night sky for a video I’m making and it is not easy.
Personally, I think a starfield is about the toughest thing to create on a computer. Computers just don’t do random very well.
BTW a great starfield tutorial here (as well as some other good space themed tuts.)
http://naldzgraphics.net/tutorials/30-photoshop-tutorials-for-creating-space-and-planets/
You’re right. It is very difficult to create a starfield on a computer-it must be done by hand, one star at a time.
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