Astronomers Look for Potential Life Zones

js7a writes "An Australian team of astronomers has an article in the latest edition Science describing a 'Galactic Habitable Zone,' which contains about 10% of all the Milky Way's stars including the Sun. Stars within this band are likely to have rocky planets large enough to hold atmospheres, are sufficiently distant from supernovae, and have existed for at least four billion years. They haven't actually found any life or earth-like planets yet, but presumably this zone is a reasonable place to narrow such searches."

Comments

A Fire upon the Deep- Nice guess!

[ControlFreal]

It is nice to see that sometimes SF authors, maybe by accident, invent some pretty accurate ideas...

Case in point here is the book A Fire upon the Deep[1] by Vernor Vinge. The book describes our Milkyway galaxy at least 30,000 years in the future. The galaxy is divided into a number of concentric zones (the zones of thought): the Unthinking Depths, in which no intelligent life is possible, the Slow Zone, in which only moderately intelligent life such as ourselves is possible, and after that the Beyond and Transcent.

The first two zones seem to pretty accurately be fitted by the results in the article. I do not know where Vinge originally got his ideas, but it's a nice match anyway.

In Vinge's outer two zones, the Beyond and the Transcent, additional nice tricks such as faster-than-light travel are possible. Personally, I can highly recomment this book: it is well written hard technological SF.

[1] A Fire upon the Deep.