Slashdot Mirror
Study Estimates 100 Billion Planets In the Milky Way Galaxy
The Bad Astronomer writes "A new study finds that there may be 100 billion alien planets in the Milky Way alone, with 17 billion of them the size of Earth. Announcements like this have been made before, but this new research is more robust than previous studies, using data from the Kepler planet-hunting spacecraft over a longer period and analyzing it in a more statistically solid way (PDF). They also found that smaller planets are not as picky about their host stars, with terrestrial planets forming around stars like the Sun or as small as tiny, cool red dwarfs with equal ease."
So are they saying there is 100,000,000,001 total planets? Thats some accuracy!
Are planets in our Solar System "Alien" or are we claiming ownership over them?
I think they just wanted to use Alien in the summary.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
640k ought to be enough for anybody.
I wonder if there is any way to statically guess the number of planets in the Goldilocks zone, the approximate distance from a star for liquid water to be possible. That would be a very interesting number but I'll just throw out a guess there will be more than one. It's remarkable to think of all the possible life that could be out there. We are probably destend to never meet, but it's interesting nonetheless. I think one of the greatest things finding life elsewhere would accomplish if it ever were to happen, is to study evolution on a completely different scale. The diversity on Earth alone is remarkable, to think what an entirely different planet might produce makes my imagination go wild.
You mean you were a kid before they discovered the planets in the solar system? O_o
Lestat, is that you?
So you're the other highlander... There can be only one!
100 billion planets and I have to be stuck on this one.
64K if you're any good.
17 billion earth sized. .1% suitable for life as we know it.
that's 17 million possible habitable worlds.
If we are alone that seems like an awful lot of wasted space.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
If we're not, there's a good chance that the aliens are too far away for it to matter. That whole "1 light-year per year" speed limit and all tends to keep 'em away.
I am officially gone from
The Fermi Paradox isn't exactly the sort of thing you can answer in the traditional sense, rather it highlights an apparent contradiction in what we could reasonably expect from the universe given it's size and age, and what we actually observe (or fail to). The Drake Equation is actually a sort of partial "answer" in that it attempts to at least formalize the specific unknowns that affect the number of potentially detectable civilizations that might currently exist in our galaxy
Initially we fed it entirely with wild speculation, now we're starting to be able to peg down some of the variables within reasonable limits. We're getting a pretty good idea of the rate of star and planet formation, starting to get a sense of the probability of Earthlike planets, and realizing that if we're any indication the window in which a civilization is "loud" enough to be detected from another star is potentially extremely short - it's questionable whether we were ever above the threshold, and our transmission strength is already beginning to fall due to more efficient technology.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Shame they didn't say that about the number of movies they made.