An international team of astronomers have reached the most definitive conclusion, one with profound implications: our galaxy contains a minimum of 100 billion planets. Of those, most are small planets like ours. Statistically, every star would have at least one planet.
According to Stephen Kane — at NASA’s Exoplanet Science Institute at CalTech in Pasadena and one of the authors of the study — “not only are planets common in the galaxy, but there are more small planets than large ones. This is encouraging news for investigations into habitable planets.”
Kane is being too conservative when he says that this is “encouraging news”. This is amazingly great news! The number of Earth-like planets is much higher than Jupiter-sized giants. The rough estimate is that there are at least 10 billion terrestrial planets across our galaxy.
That is a mind-blowing number.
Couple this with the increasing number of planets orbiting in the goldilocks zone — the area where Earth-like environments can happen — and the fact that life happens spontaneously even under the most extreme conditions, and the idea of a University thriving with life is impossible to deny. There’s no doubt that, statistically, there’s life out there.
Intelligent Civilisations
Of course, how much of this life is smart enough to build computers, communication dishes or Imperial Star Destroyers is another matter altogether. As far as we know, all those habitable worlds may be full of killer snails and dozy fish
But the fact remains that, until now, we could only guess much of this stuff. Now we know. That makes a big difference.
The fact that there are at least 100 billion planets in our Milky Way alone has profound implications for our understanding of the Universe. These discoveries, made using Hubble and Kepler, are finally putting some real numbers in the Drake Equation.
The equation — created by Frank Drake, Emeritus Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of California, Santa Cruz — is used to estimate the number of extraterrestrial civilisations in the Milky Way galaxy.
Until know, as Dr Sagan explains in the video, we could only use educated guesses. Now we are starting to fill in the gaps and things couldn’t look better. [Hubble]
bob
Friday, January 13, 2012 at 8:17 AM“…and the idea of a University thriving with life is impossible to deny.”
Yup.
TJ
Friday, January 13, 2012 at 8:19 AMI want to see Universities thriving with life 2! ;)
Paul
Friday, January 13, 2012 at 8:22 AM“until now, we could only guess much of this stuff. Now we know”
Sorry if I’m just being cynical, but we still don’t “know” there is life out there, it is still only a statistical calculation. Until we physically can see the life out there, we don’t “know” that it exists.
For the record… I am a believer, but one that wants to see cold hard evidence.
Timmahh
Friday, January 13, 2012 at 9:29 AMHave to agree there, Drakes equation still stands but knowing there are planets out there and knowing there is life on them is two different things! Don’t get me wrong, I’ve always believed, ever since I was kid, that there was life out there! I just think this is stretching the known fact a bit!
Antonia
Friday, January 13, 2012 at 9:39 AMThe only thing one can know for certain is one’s own existence: “I think therefore I am”.
EMH
Friday, January 13, 2012 at 10:16 AMSorry to disappoint you but you are only a butterfly thinking you are a person; you don’t really exist at all.
As to life elsewhere, I still think it unlikely if only in our time. Maybe before us, maybe after us, but probably not with us.
Osiris Fox
Friday, January 13, 2012 at 10:43 AMPlease explain your butterfly hypothesis?
Antonia
Friday, January 13, 2012 at 11:35 AMI’ll pretend that your illogical response also does not exist :-)
Antonia
Friday, January 13, 2012 at 11:36 AM(Dang replying to the wrong post)
That is, EMH’s response.
Mikey
Friday, January 13, 2012 at 2:45 PMAre you certain that thought equals existence? I’m not certain that you can be certain of that.
Steve
Sunday, January 15, 2012 at 6:30 PMYou realise that in the timeline of the universe, life on Earth has been limited mostly by the cooling and formation of our planet that has existed in the past 4.5 billion years of ~14 billion.
This conceit that humans, for no obvious reason, are some special snowflake in this universe is staggering. If a planet just happened to form a billion years before Earth and supported life, we’re talking about species an order of magnitude more developed and advanced than us.
Humans might nuke or starve ourselves into extinction but the universe won’t care. Extra-terrestrial species have probably existed before us, are existing right now somewhere and will continue to come and go well after we are gone.
AshR
Friday, January 13, 2012 at 10:34 AMHaven’t you seen the Matrix?
We’re all plugged into a giant interactive computer game to power the machines.
Have to say, that was the first movie I had seen that really made me question my own existence, coming out of the movie theater and looking around had a very surreal feeling.
Antonia
Friday, January 13, 2012 at 11:35 AMThat is, EMH’s response.
Antonia
Friday, January 13, 2012 at 11:36 AMThat is, EMH’s response.
Ash
Friday, January 13, 2012 at 11:00 AMNeo also thought this before he took the pill and woke up in the Matrix.
S Kumar
Friday, January 13, 2012 at 10:42 AMLookup Wickramasinghe and Hoyle’s experiments in 1970s where they proved that the Universe is teeming with life – for those in the know, Wickramasinghe was Stephen Hawking’s mentor and greatest supporter, and Hoyle was his teacher and greatest detractor of his theory of the Big Bang
Steve
Sunday, January 15, 2012 at 6:24 PMNonsense. All we know is that there’s a very, very strong possibility (almost a certainty) that there is life out there. But to prove there is extra-terrestrial life, you need to provide evidence of just that… that there’s life out there. There’s a very big difference.
alien
Friday, January 13, 2012 at 11:55 AMyou don’t need to search the universe for other forms of life. There are other forms of life on earth which are not human or animal. You just need to open your mind and you will find evidence all over the web… (no im not talking about ufo youtube videos)
Drongo
Friday, January 13, 2012 at 1:16 PMYou must be talking about the creatures that comment on YouTube videos then. I too wonder where those things come from. They can’t all dwell under the same bridge
Mikey
Friday, January 13, 2012 at 2:15 PM“and the fact that life happens spontaneously”
Better that you stick to tech-blogging. You’re better at it than fanciful extrapolations on the origins of life.
btw. material science has thoroughly debunked auto-genesis. Hundreds of years ago ;)
rj
Friday, January 13, 2012 at 6:44 PMi sick of hearing these from so called professors and the like, why do they keep on insisting that life can only exist on a planet like earth, same size, same distance from the sun etc. i thought we got over this steriotyping phase years ago. it’s sad to think we call these people smart. no wonder we haven’t found life in the universe yet.
Steve
Sunday, January 15, 2012 at 6:26 PMThis ‘box’ that the scientists are bound by, is due to the fact that we honestly don’t know if there’s such a thing as non-carbon based lifeforms and until we have terrestrial examples, anything outside this criteria is considered science fiction. It’s very possible that there are drastically different bases for life out there, which is why the term they most often use is “life as we know it” which is a very important disclaimer.