Billions of Planets In Milky Way?

jeffsenter writes, "The Washington Post has the story: 'NASA scientists using the Hubble Space Telescope have discovered what they believe are 16 new planets deep in the Milky Way, leading them to conclude there are probably billions of planets spread throughout the galaxy.' What sets these potential planets apart is they are in the central bulge of the Milky Way where most stars are located. More planets in the galaxy means more chances for life." The 16 are planet candidates at this point, until verified by spectroscopic measurement of their parent stars' wobbles, which probably can't be done until the James Webb Space Telescope files in 2013.

Comments

Billions of *Jupiter sized* gas giants

[Anonymous Coward]

Harbouring what form of life exactly.

Common sense suggests that there are billions of planets in the galaxy, and that millions of them could harbour life, and that thousands of them have significant evolved life and a few have intelligent (tool using or above) life. That's just playing with numbers and likelihoods and the belief that we're not a one off.

But this just shows that there are lots of large gas giants. Maybe there's life on their moons...

Re:Billions of *Jupiter sized* gas giants

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

How do you deduce, using common sense, that one in a thousand planets could harbor life?

How do you deduce, using common sense, that one in a thousand planets that harbor life have 'significant life'? (Whatever that is.)

How do you deduce, using common sense, that a few in a thousand planets with 'significant life' have 'intelligent' life?

That's just playing with numbers and likelihoods

Oh, right. You just made up some random stuff and then claimed it was suggested by common sense.

... spread out over Billions of Years!

[redelm]

The problem with multi-species science fiction is that it assumes contemporaneous (nearly synchronous!) technological development. Yet development is entirely an artifact without obvious time-based causes. And seems to proceed very swiftly on the geologic time scale.

SETI's odds are very poor on this score.

Re:16 -- billions

[iamlucky13]

Nice. But getting past the joke for anyone who may be confused:

If you observe a field of 100 stars and find that 16 of them have planets, then it is not unreasonable to speculate on the extension that 16% or so of all stars have planets. Thus from a galaxy with 200 billion stars, billions of them may have planets.

Furthermore, none of this precludes the possibility that more stars may have planets than don't.

Unfortunately, however, Worldcom didn't really have more cash than their independent auditors found, but that's another story.

Re:Working on it!

[OrangeTide]

I would hope that repairing the existing telescope would be cheaper than putting up a new one. And ideally I think we all would like multiple Hubble-class telescopes going at once. I wish there was some way to save the Hubble, maybe put it in a museum or something. So little space history has been preserved because it is not economical to do so.

If we save the hubble, maybe 100 years from now they will have coated it with diamond-polymer and put it on the playground at the city museum for the kids to climb on.