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Scientists Estimate 40% of Red Dwarfs Have A Rocky Planet

Posted by Unknown on from the next-real-estate-boom dept.

An anonymous reader writes with an excerpt from Science World Report: "Astronomers hunting for rocky planets with the right temperature to support life estimate there may be tens of billions of them in our galaxy alone. A European team said on Wednesday that about 40 percent of red dwarf stars — the most common type in the Milky Way — have a so-called 'super-Earth' planet orbiting in a habitable zone that would allow water to flow on the surface."

9 of 114 comments (clear)

  1. Drake equation by jcreus · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The figures should be updated!

    1. Re:Drake equation by zrbyte · · Score: 3, Interesting

      The Drake equation could be updated, but I think it has too many factors which have very high error margins. This just means that we would not be much smarter with the updated equation.
      Hunt for the spectra of the atmospheres of exoplanets! That should give us some idea if life exists there or not.

  2. Re:But only *one* Red Dwarf... by Richard_at_work · · Score: 3, Funny

    I was going to go for the Rimmer shot, personally...

  3. Re:They Further Speculate That... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    they would be given extraordinary supper powers

    Is that like, the ability to create a really tasty dinner or something? Or they just get really fucking hungry in the late afternoon?

  4. But are they cold outside? by mfnickster · · Score: 3, Funny

    With no kind of atmosphere?

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  5. We Are Not Alone by chill · · Score: 4, Insightful

    We're eventually going to find out that not only we aren't alone, but we're pretty fucking insignificant and late to the party.

    The answer to the question "if intelligent life is out there, where are they" will be "not here because we're boring and common". Like the unpopular kid who throws a party and wonders where all the cool kids are, we're in for an ego-bruising answer.

    On a side note, it is looking more and more like we can shave 3-4 terms off of Drake's Equation. R, f(p), n(e) and L are looking to be more and more equal to some big number.

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    1. Re:We Are Not Alone by mark-t · · Score: 5, Insightful
      I do not think you realize just how big this planet is, and how resilient life, even human life is.

      There have been explosions on this planet orders of magnitude greater than anything that man has ever produced... and some have even happened during the period while man was walking on this sphere. Yet mankind survived... while many thousands were wiped out in the region of devastation, mankind endured on a global scale... as of course did life itself.

      The total nuclear yield of every bomb currently in existence is the equivalent of about 5000 megatons of TNT, which is over an order of magnitude less than the last eruption of the Yellowstone supervolcano, which occurred circa 74,000 BC. Homo sapiens evolved circa 500,000 BC, and modern man has been around since at least 100,000 BC, so there were definitely people on the planet at that time. In spite of the explosion, and its effects on global climate, mankind endured.

      Heck, it's still barely a quarter the size of the Tambora volcano explosion, in Indonesia in 1815, and that wiped out fewer than 100,000 people.

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  6. Re:I wonder... by AdrianKemp · · Score: 3, Interesting

    What you asked, yes wormholes are entirely based in science and the current mathematical models that we have for the universe generally state that they must be possible (in some cases, must exist). Not all, but many.

    What you meant, is there any *truth* to wormholes; meaning were the sci-fi novels correct: No, not really. Unless you can move the ends of a wormhole there isn't much use to them; and the math is much less supportive of that.

    However, generally speaking on average our current physics models say yes they are possible and yes they *may* be possible to create. However they say so in sort of the same way that they say travelling faster than light is possible (in that they don't expressly forbid it, but generally require infinite energy to actually get there).

    Some other physics grads/docs will come and call me out for inaccuracies, but please understand I'm intentionally over-simplifying.

  7. Re:Not so fast by Hatta · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The Drake Equation is still useless like that, we have no idea what half the probabilities are, and any one of those can be so exceptionally small that the other ones being near 1 won't matter.

    The Drake Equation is useful as a tool for understanding which probabilities are unknown. That's all it was ever meant to be.

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