Astronomers see more planets than stars in galaxy

Thanks to NASA's new Kepler planet-hunting telescope, it seems they think they see more planets than stars in the Galaxy.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The more astronomers look for other worlds, the more they find that it is a crowded and crazy cosmos. They think planets easily outnumber stars in our galaxy and they are even finding them in the strangest of places.

And they have only begun to count.

Three studies released Wednesday, in the journal Nature and at the American Astronomical Society's conference in Austin, Texas, demonstrate an extrasolar real estate boom. One study shows that in our Milky Way, most stars have planets. And since there are a lot of stars in our galaxy — about 100 billion — that means a lot of planets.

"We're finding an exciting potpourri of things we didn't even think could exist," said Harvard University astronomer Lisa Kaltenegger, including planets that mirror "Star Wars" Luke Skywalker's home planet with twin suns and a mini-star system with a dwarf sun and shrunken planets.

link for more

thats why its foolish to assume they arent already here.

Not surprising in the least.

Just take our Solar System for example. There's an 8:1 ratio...

reply to post by BohemianBrim


Looks like they will sit on that secret as long as they can..But one day

reply to post by susp3kt


Kind of appears there may be some back-peddling taking place. As if more of the big thinkers are covering their butts so they can say "hey we told there were..."

As Carl Sagan said:

"Those worlds in space are as countless as all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the earth. Each of those worlds is as real as ours and every one of them is a succession of incidents, events, occurrences which influence its future. Countless worlds, numberless moments, an immensity of space and time. And our small planet at this moment, here we face a critical branch point in history, what we do with our world, right now, will propagate down through the centuries and powerfully affect the destiny of our descendants, it is well within our power to destroy our civilization and perhaps our species as well. If we capitulate to superstition or greed or stupidity we could plunge our world into a time of darkness deeper than the time between the collapse of classical civilization and the Italian Renaissance. But we are also capable of using our compassion and our intelligence, our technology and our wealth to make an abundant and meaningful life for every inhabitant of this planet."

reply to post by BohemianBrim


You mean planets? Yes, there are lots of planets already 'here', and many more moons, and even more asteroids.

But here is what I always hate.

"We're finding an exciting potpourri of things we didn't even think could exist," said Harvard University astronomer Lisa Kaltenegger

You get an accredited respected astronomer comment about something she didn't think could exist. I find that hard to believe a person dedicating their life's work in the field couldn't imagine something as natural as molecular clouds collapsing into a ball of plasma to form a star wouldn't be surrounded by a protoplanetary disk rotating leftover matter to form orbiting planets, as normal. I have to believe its sort of, a kind of inside professional speak, that to someone outside the field of study (like me) or academic community (unlike me) interprets as something entirely different, that she finds it shocking or surprising. It might be just me, but I would be more shocked to find stars without orbiting debris chunks undergoing accretion and gravity assisted planet formation.

isn't that like...obvious??

what did they think? more stars than planets? did they assume planets were rare?

Soon enough we will find a whole host of earth-like planets in their respective goldilocks zones, then out of those I think it would be wise to search for life, I think SETI will have success one day as I would imagine that any growing and developing civilization will be creating some energy we can detect.

It's only a matter of time *crosses fingers*

Kepler has shown the way for the James Webb Space Telescope, which should have been placed in space in 2014 but has been pushed back to 2018 because of funding--and even that is in question due to funding cuts. Hopefully this news will add a little more weight to the "need" for Webb, and as soon as possible.

How do people believe we are the only life out there..

reply to post by susp3kt

Not surprising in the least. Just take our Solar System for example. There's an 8:1 ratio...

Yeah I always just sort of figured most Stars had planets. Still for those not as dumb as me this is exciting.

Originally posted by PlanetaryDuality
How do people believe we are the only life out there..

I know, it seems a very ignorant and outdated belief to me and I find it strange that the mainstream scientists who work on these projects etc act shocked and supprised when what to me seems only likely and commonplace is found to be just that!

Originally posted by Illustronic
reply to post by BohemianBrim

 

You mean planets? Yes, there are lots of planets already 'here', and many more moons, and even more asteroids.

I understood "they" to mean aliens. You can't talk about planets without talking about the existence of aliens IMHO. We can talk about igneous and sedimentary rock untill the cows come home, but my bet is, humans will focus on the planets which are more likely to harbour living organisms. SETI are already concentrating on a few Keplar planets. I also suspect we'll receive a message pretty soon. Hopefully it won't be an SOS like in the movie Alien.

I'm very excited by all this, but worried about how religious zealots will cope with finding out that not only is the Earth not flat or the centre of the universe, but that man is not the most intelligent organism either.

I just remember back to how an insecure ex girlfriend reacted when I told her she wasn't the centre of my universe! I still have physical scars after 10 years.

Originally posted by wutz4tom

Thanks to NASA's new Kepler planet-hunting telescope, it seems they think they see more planets than stars in the Galaxy.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The more astronomers look for other worlds, the more they find that it is a crowded and crazy cosmos. They think planets easily outnumber stars in our galaxy and they are even finding them in the strangest of places.

And they have only begun to count.

Three studies released Wednesday, in the journal Nature and at the American Astronomical Society's conference in Austin, Texas, demonstrate an extrasolar real estate boom. One study shows that in our Milky Way, most stars have planets. And since there are a lot of stars in our galaxy — about 100 billion — that means a lot of planets.

"We're finding an exciting potpourri of things we didn't even think could exist," said Harvard University astronomer Lisa Kaltenegger, including planets that mirror "Star Wars" Luke Skywalker's home planet with twin suns and a mini-star system with a dwarf sun and shrunken planets.

By now everyones heard these comments made by the late Ronald Reagan...

September 21st, 1987:Before the United Nations General Assembly: " In our obsession with antagonisms of the moment," said Reagan, "we often forget how much unites all the members of humanity. Perhaps we need some outside, universal threat to make us recognize this common bond. I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world. And yet, I ask you," he went on, "is not an alien threat already among us? What could be more alien to universal aspirations of our peoples than war and the threat of war?"

UN Video

Seems like if TPTB know something,it might not be a bad time to share...

edit on 11-1-2012 by wutz4tom because: (no reason given)

reply to post by PlanetaryDuality


I'm not singling you out personally, but this gives me an opportunity to point something out. A sense of scale and time.

Here is live tracking of the Voyager spacecrafts, you can watch the distance calculator move. Voyager 1 launched in September 1977, over 34 years ago, is now just over 16 and a half light hours away. Now think our closest star is 4.2 light years away, and we get some sense of scale. Our sun holds orbiting mass up to and maybe slightly over one light year distant, the Oort cloud, and in 34 years our little traveling metal is 16 and a half hours into that year.

Its not me to suggest life doesn't exist elsewhere, I just have no indications that it has made the journey here. We have methods for determining the age of stars, and our stellar neighborhood is populated with younger stars than our sun. That would suggest the closer planets would be behind us in evolution of intelligent life, so aliens would have to make a longer journey to get here.

I'm also not dismissing the possibility of how advanced an intelligent rave could be beyond us if they had say a couple million year head start in evolving than us, but c is a barrier that would require our understanding of fundamental particle physics to be seriously wrong, and therefore, our science didn't really split the atom, our chemical research never made penicillin, and microwave ovens are a myth, well you get the gist of my logic.

Its an extraordinary claim to make, that requires extraordinary evidence to have me believe I walk amongst aliens.

I understand that near light speed travel slows the clock of the travelers, in respect to time passage here grounded on earth. So I'm not dismissing the notion that earth may never have been visited by an advanced race in the distant past. After all, a round trip near light speed journey that may last two months to aliens traveling, a few thousand years would elapse here on earth in our time frame.

Distance is great, there's more space between things than things, light speed travel makes ineffective travel time unreasonable to get to distant stars. Something has to go much faster than c to move about the stars.

Don't simply assume Eienstein is right. He will be WRONG tmorrow. Would you have a doctor from the middle ages cut you open to fix your soul? Massive distance and E=mc^2 is just our current perception. We've already discovered synchronous particles that move in sympathy no matter where in the universe they are. The speed of light barrier is currently up for debate only weeks ago. Weve only been talking for 10,000yrs and via radio waves for the last hundred. Add just 1,000yrs to our current rate of development, and, assuming we don't accidentally destroy ourselves with it, surely you can see that our technology will get us to the stars. Tele-robotics, quantum knowledge and sympathetic resonance will have us exploring these worlds / listening in for communication in no time. E=mc^2 is no line in the sand. It's just a clever mans formula. None of us are God.

One day you'll see that poster of Einstein and regard him as the bright scientist he was. Had he been a doctor in his day, he'd have recommended fresh air and plenty of rest for your cancer and thalydamide for your wife's morning sickness.

reply to post by Illustronic


no i mean aliens, on planet earth.

i find it hard to believe that knowing everything you just explained,
knowing now how very many planets there are,
having a fairly good guess at the age of the universe,
knowing the relatively short amount of time it takes for life to evolve on a planet given the right conditions
knowing how life tends to make great leaps in evolution over short periods based on any number of random factors
realizing those conditions are bound to occur more than just once, but in fact in a great multitude, with yet again a great multitude of possible random factors causing any further great multitudes of evolutionary jumps
realizing that those conditions and that life could have evolved long before it did here on earth allowing for its evolution to have gone far far far beyond our own
assuming, not too far out of bounds, that life would not be so much different as our own various forms here on earth, all of which share the urge to spread out and multiply... as we find them in every spot we search

if you have a bag of rice, and you stick your finger in and pick out one grain with some mold on it.. would you be foolish to assume the mold had spread?

as i said.. it would be foolish to assume it had not
and as you said.. you hate when people lack imagination

reply to post by wutz4tom


I would of thought that there would be more planets than stars myself, only because thats what we have??
But I'm not anywhere near an expert.

reply to post by wutz4tom



An Otherworldly Discovery: Billions of Other Planets .

link

Astronomers said Wednesday that each of the 100 billion stars in the Milky Way probably has at least one companion planet, on average, adding credence to the notion that planets are as common in the cosmos as grains of sand on the beach.