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Astronomers Estimate Milky Way May Have 100 Billion Alien Worlds

Posted by samzenpus on from the that's-a-lot-of-away-missions dept.

astroengine writes "Last year, using the exoplanets discovered by the Kepler space telescope as a guide, astronomers took a statistical stab at estimating the number of exoplanets that exist in our galaxy. They came up with at least 50 billion alien worlds. Today, astronomers from the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Md., and the PLANET (Probing Lensing Anomalies NETwork) collaboration have taken their own stab at the 'galactic exo-planetary estimate' and think there are at least 100 billion worlds knocking around the Milky Way."

3 of 294 comments (clear)

  1. Re:100 billion likely way too low by wierd_w · · Score: 5, Informative

    The problem is that unless said aliens are pulling the strings on a galactic core super massive black hole and manipulating the plasma jet to serve as a "fucking huge" high gain antenna, the attenuation of the rf signal by interaction with cosmic dust will turn even a real whopper of a broadcast into white noise before it reaches us.

    Basically, they would have to be broadcasting a massively powerful signal capable of killing off lifeforms from the raw energy in the wave before we could detect it at our distance.

  2. Re:100 billion likely way too low by khallow · · Score: 5, Informative

    The problem is that unless said aliens are pulling the strings on a galactic core super massive black hole and manipulating the plasma jet to serve as a "fucking huge" high gain antenna

    They could always just build a big antenna with some power and decent cooling. And we could do the same. No need to sterilize a galactic core any more than it already has been. Cosmic dust is not that effective an attenuator or we wouldn't be able to see objects billions of light years away.

  3. Re:100 billion likely way too low by tigersha · · Score: 5, Informative

    No, the Voyager probes transmit at 23 Watts, which is basically nothing. The entire power system on the craft can generate about 250 Watts, which is used for all the systems. The fact that Nasa can track an object transmitting half the power of a lightbulb 11 billion km away to very fine precision is absolutely the most amazing thing they ever did in the space program IMHO.

    http://science.howstuffworks.com/question431.htm

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