What A Beatiful Thought - Scientists estimate 30 billion Earths

Discussion in 'General' started by Superjoint, Jul 3, 2002.

  1. Scientists estimate 30 billion Earths

    There could be billions of Earths out there

    By Dr David Whitehouse
    BBC News Online science editor

    Astronomers say there could be billions of Earths in our galaxy, the Milky Way.
    Their assessment comes after the discovery of the 100th exoplanet - a planet that circles a star other than our own.

    The latest find is a gas giant, just like all the other exoplanets so far detected, and orbits a Sun-like star 293 light-years away.

    Scientists say they are now in a position to try to estimate how many planets may exist in the galaxy and speculate on just how many could be like the Earth. The answer in both cases is billions.

    Virtually all the stars out to about 100 light-years distant have been surveyed. Of these 1,000 or so stars, about 10% have been found to possess planetary systems.

    So, with about 300 billion stars in our galaxy, there could be about 30 billion planetary systems in the Milky Way alone; and a great many of these systems are very likely to include Earth-like worlds, say researchers.

    Better grasp

    The 100th new planet circles the star HD 2039. It was found by astronomers using the Anglo-Australian Telescope as part of the Carnegie Institution Planet Search Program.


    The Jupiter-sized world circles its star every 1,210 days at a distance of about 320 million kilometres (200 million miles).

    Astronomer Dr Jean Schneider, who compiles the Extrasolar Planets Catalogue, told BBC News Online: "The 100th planet is symbolic and important.

    "The first discoveries concentrated on short orbital periods because of the limited timebase of observations. Now, we are learning more about the statistics of long orbital periods and know to what extent our own Jupiter is exceptional or not."

    New telescopes

    With the new world, astronomers say that they have just about finished surveying all the Sun-like stars out to a distance of 100 light-years from Earth.

    Current planet detection technology - based on the "wobble" induced in the parent star by the gravitational pull of the orbiting planet - can only detect worlds about the mass of Saturn or larger. Earth-sized worlds are too small to be seen.

    But even in this "biased" survey of giants, the smaller worlds predominate - which makes astronomers think that Earth-like worlds do exist. They may even be as common as Jupiter-sized exoplanets.

    And if stellar statistics gathered in our local region of space are applied to our galaxy of 300 billion stars, then there may be 30 billion Jupiter-like worlds and perhaps as many Earth-like worlds as well.

    Astronomers will have to wait for a new generation of space-based telescopes incorporating advanced detectors before they can detect Earth-sized worlds orbiting other stars.
    -------------------------------------------------------------


    I'm always wondering if ET smokes pot?

    SJ
     
  2. Look at the evidence:
    ET has long glowing fingers (good for rolling?) which could contain some kind of lighter...

    And doesn't ET raid elliot's fridge at some point in the film? If my memory serves me correctly- someones got the interstellar munchies!!!
     
  3. I just cant wait for the day when aliens land on our planet and I get to exchange earth drugs with their planet's drugs...fun fun fun
     
  4. thanks for posting this to the 'city, superjoint! i wonder if we'll all be alive when they finally make contact with other life forms. i wonder if we're the most advanced, or least advanced of life in this... everything.
    it'll be interesting, and i hope i'm around to find out.. unless other life out there is like those things in Final Fantasy...
     
  5. ^that title isn't really relative to da reply... just wanted to say it there.

    so, now that we have a figure for how many earth like planets there may be out there... how many class M planets (to use teh star trek definition) actually have life on them at this time?

    i think the outlook is good if we are finding so many with gas giants, because they act like the protective vacum, succing up any dangerous stray comets and meteors etc, keeping the smaller planets safe.

    but what about the nomadic dark planets? i'm sure that if it is finally proven that most planets do not orbit stars then there will be a great chance of there being many that are "occupied" by life.

    there is life out there... no question about that. but how much of it is inteligent and mobile? and how many then are as inteligent or more so, than us? and then how many of them have found away to travel accross great distances of space in a short period of time.

    i feel another post in the evolution thread coming on. thoughts are gathering as you read this.
     
  6. im sure we are just a tiny spec in the planetary chain...
    peace
     
  7. There has to be life out there.. The universe is endless and we are nothing compared to it's size. And when the aliens land it's time to party :cool:
     
  8. yeah. that 30 bil or whatever... that's just our galaxy... there are more galaxies out there than there are stars in our galaxy! that's a heckova lot of potential for life... and if a species has found a way to travel convieniently through space at speed, i don't imagine the distance between galaxies would be that much of a big hurdle either... this place could be absolutely teaming with ships.
     
  9. You guys act like you've never encountered aliens before. No one else here has been taken into the mother ship? NuBBiN, you haven't done their drugs yet? I find it hard to believe that they didn't scope you, of all people, out.




    I agree with Higha-we are but just a spec in the cosmos. What we don't know fascinates me more than what we do know.
     
  10. well...sometimes I like to imagine that drugs are like tuning keys...our whole lives exist on this "frequency" where we only exist within those limits, but when you take a drug, mainly a psychedellic it acts as a tool which is able to tune your frequency off of the normal dimention's and into another one....think of it as our whole exisence as being on one radio station, but with the proper tools you can manipulate the radio and change to another station, if not entirely to another station but in between two, so you get lots of static with mixed music playing at once.... If that were true, then I guess we could truly say that we on a frequent basis have contact with alien life...maybe not from our own dimension, but its still another way to have contact...
     
  11. so kinda like parallel universes?


    Dude I'm gonna start a fat roto and smoke up with my 30 billion parallel selves.
     
  12. Whoa, brought this one back from the long, long ago.
     
  13. Omg! I didn't even notice this thread is like 7 years old. Hahaha.
     
  14. I'm glad he did, this thread tripped me out lol:smoke:
     
  15. Holy SHIET! NuBBiN , I tottally forgot about that guy.

    Highawatha i aient seen in awhile either.


    And loved it when Rummy posted more reguarly.
     
  16. yeah, i barely remember those people, but i always remembered nubbin because of that avatar, lol.(obviously i know who OP and RMJL is)

    but dude, what an awesome thread :)

    it makes david wilcock even more believeable(sp?)
    supposedly theres 56 or so species of humanoid aliens known in our galaxy, this backs it up even more, there really could be...
     
  17. Wow, this article is 7 years old... There has to be some new research out there, I'm gonna wikipedia this shit. :smoke:
     
  18. We live on one earth - the one we all know and love.
     
  19. This has nothing to do with parallel universes.
    It's still in the same universe we're in.
     
  20. You do realize this thread is like 7 years old right?
     

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