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Billions of Planets In Milky Way?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the billions-and-billions dept.

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.

5 of 238 comments (clear)

  1. Billions of *Jupiter sized* gas giants by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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...

  2. Working on it! by ThankfulJosh · · Score: 5, Informative

    I work for the Shuttle program. The current plan is to send up a Hubble repair mission. Can't say when, but it's definitely planned.

  3. 16 -- billions by GungaDan · · Score: 5, Funny

    Fuck my accountant. I'm getting an astronomer.

    --
    Eloi are stupid, throw morlocks at them!
  4. Re:Good ol' hubble by AsmCoder8088 · · Score: 5, Interesting
    There are some advantages to ground-based scopes versus ones such as the Hubble. For instance, you can get a great deal more sensitivity on the ground than in space simply due to the fact that the aperture of the primary mirror can be made much larger for a ground scope than a space scope. The reason behind this is cost - it is far more expensive to put a large mirror in space than on the ground. However, since it is in space, the smaller mirror does have better resolution. So it is simply a trade-off between sensitivity and resolution. With greater sensitivity, you can pull in fainter objects, but with better resolution, you can differentiate more easily between distance objects.

    This is a great example of a ground-based telescope that could easily rival any space telescope:

    OWL Telescope

  5. ... spread out over Billions of Years! by redelm · · Score: 5, Insightful
    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.