Super-Earths 'in the Billions'

"Our new observations with Harps mean that about 40% of all red dwarf stars have a super-Earth orbiting in the habitable zone where liquid water can exist on the surface of the planet," said team leader Xavier Bonfils from the Observatoire des Sciences de l'Univers de Grenoble, France.

"Because red dwarfs are so common - there are about 160 billion of them in the Milky Way - this leads us to the astonishing result that there are tens of billions of these planets in our galaxy alone."

Source - www.bbc.co.uk...

Wow.. Billions, there's plenty of choice of where to go once we've destroyed this planet then.

Just have to watch out for the locals, and make a craft the can travel 30 light years and sustain man for a few generations.

Obviously those planets are only created to fill up all that unused space, as some god created only us.. Or do you beg to differ, religion?

reply to post by ManFromEurope


It's like the line in 'Contact' when they initially wouldn't send Jodie through because she didn't believe in god, bunch of flat earthers as far as i'm concerned

reply to post by ManFromEurope


Not wanting to bring religion into this but yes.... I do beg to differ.

Way too many hot topics on ATS at the moment.

Oh... I've worked out it would only take circa 100,000 years to travel 30 light years using a Photonic Drive.... thats around 1,250ish generations of man. So if we leave now, my great great great x 1,248 grandson would get there and have a choice of 100 super-Earths to choose from. Need to make a light speed craft and get there in 30 years me thinks, I want to see what they look like too.

Originally posted by ManFromEurope
Obviously those planets are only created to fill up all that unused space, as some god created only us.. Or do you beg to differ, religion?

Well said! My sentiments exactly.

That's a great find S&F!!

The original French paper can be seen here

The technical English PDF eso releases are:
- The HARPS search for southern extra-solar planets. XXXV. Super-Earths around the M-dwarf neighbors Gl 433 and Gl 667C. 14 pages released in February 2012.
- The HARPS search for southern extra-solar planets. 77 pages released in November 2011.


Artistic view of sunset from Super-Earth Gliese 667Cc.

This artist's view shows a sunset seen from the super-Earth Gliese 667Cc. The brightest star in the sky is the red dwarf Gliese 667 C, which belongs to a triple star system. The two other more distant stars, Gliese 667 A and B also appear on the right in the sky. The astronomers estimated that there were tens of billions of rocky worlds like this one orbiting red dwarfs faint, just in the Milky Way.

"...tens of billions..."!! Makes me wonder how many there are in this small 1.5° square view (in blue) of the whole sky where there are 200 000 galaxies!!



See here -----------> 200 000 galaxies in this 6 TB IR photo!! Deepest IR sky view ever taken

Yet another step towards the most important discovery of humankind: we are not alone in the Universe...

I can't believe we are all still sitting here on this over-crowded and vulnerable rock! The number one priority for humanity should be to colonise other planets, and if there are this many then we are idiots if we don't. As long as we sit here like this we are either going to destroy ourselves or get destroyed.

We are so stupid.

Originally posted by II HAL II
reply to post by ManFromEurope

 

Not wanting to bring religion into this but yes.... I do beg to differ.

Way too many hot topics on ATS at the moment.

Oh... I've worked out it would only take circa 100,000 years to travel 30 light years using a Photonic Drive.... thats around 1,250ish generations of man. So if we leave now, my great great great x 1,248 grandson would get there and have a choice of 100 super-Earths to choose from. Need to make a light speed craft and get there in 30 years me thinks, I want to see what they look like too.

But then by the time your grand x1248 son arrives on that new planet, mankind on earth would have invented wormhole instant travel and that new planet would have already been settled for a millennium.

reply to post by elevenaugust


Great post and very informative..... at least I know what they will look like now.... put a hold on those light speed craft.

Thanks for the extra info.

Originally posted by gosseyn
But then by the time your grand x1248 son arrives on that new planet, mankind on earth would have invented wormhole instant travel and that new planet would have already been settled for a millennium.

Thats brilliant... imagine spending thousands of years on a craft, with one aim to reach the new world. You can imagine it as this great quest for mankind, almost of religious proportions, from generation to generation passing down tales and fables of how their quest is of such importance...

Then you arrive to find mankind got there thousands of years ago via a wormhole..... almost sounds like a book in the making lol.

Amazing.
How could we humans be so arrogant to think we are so special in a universe so big we can't even contemplate in our head. looking at some of them pictures reminds me of parts of this quote from 2010.

"My dear Christopher: This is the last time I’ll be able to speak to you for a long while. I’m trying to put into words what has happened. Maybe that’s for historians to do sometime later. They will record that the next day, the President of the United States looked out of the White House window and the Premier of the Soviet Union looked out of the Kremlin window, and saw the new distant sun in the sky. They read the message, and perhaps they learned something because they finally recalled their ships and their planes. I am going to sleep now. I will dream of you and your mother. I will sleep knowing that you are both safe, that the fear is over. We have seen the process of life take place. Maybe this is the way it happened on Earth millions of years ago. Maybe it’s something completely different. I still don’t know really what the monolith is. I think it’s many things. An embassy for an intelligence beyond ours. A shape of some kind for something that has no shape. Your children will be born in a world of two suns. They will never know a sky without them. You can tell them that you remember when there was a pitch black sky with no bright star, and people feared the night. You can tell them when we were alone, when we couldn’t point to the light and say to ourselves – ‘There is life out there.’ Someday, the children of the new sun will meet the children of the old. I think they will be our friends. You can tell your children of the day when everyone looked up and realized that we were only tenants of this world. We have been given a new lease and a warning from the landlord."

reply to post by II HAL II


Its a fairly common theme in sci-fi. I often wonder that if humans are not well suited for colonizing other planets then perhaps we could at least seed microbes

reply to post by Fisherr


That's beautiful, almost brought a tear to my red glowing eye.

I tend to agree with OliArtist above, we should look to get of this planet and start again.

Imagine the possibilities if we could, we could learn from our mistakes here and apply what does work -

We could apply environmentally sound technologies
We could ban weapons of massive destruction
We could look at alternatives to the crazy way the financial systems work
We could distribute land equally to each person and do away with power hungry maniacs


The possibilities would be endless as far as starting afresh

You could even populate several planets, try different methods of running them and then apply what works best from each to start a super Earth II, with the best of all worlds incorporated.

I may have just got carried away there...lol, but we all know we have a time limit here on earth so why not look at putting massive resources into extending the shelf life of humanity....

Then again would that be a good thing? Would we just mess up a few more planets on our way?

You have to wonder what kind of life would be on those planets due to the higher gravity, since those planets have a lot more mass than the earth.

I would imagine colonist from Earth would have a hard time due to that increase of gravity. I think I remember Larry Niven showing that in many of his novels....let me see if I can't find a link......


Yah, here we go:

Jinx

The world is a satellite of a gas giant named Binary in the Sirius A system, and is home to a human colony. Jinx is six times more massive than Earth, and very dense, with a surface gravity of about 1.78 times Earth gravity. Its nickel-iron core is half the diameter of the world, the rest being rocky mantle and crust. Its most distinctive feature is its shape, that of a prolate spheroid (a rugby-ball or egg-shape). The idea is that the shape of Jinx was fixed when it was in a close orbit to its primary, leading to tidal forces strong enough to produce this shape. Over time, tidal effects have caused Jinx to recede from its primary, while at the same time the planet has cooled and become more rigid, retaining its distorted shape. The extreme variations in altitude caused by this unusual shape have resulted in five distinct environmental zones.

Generations of colonist, the Jinx people are now short and squat, with large strength, but predisposed to heart failure.

All science fiction, but I like reading authors like Larry Niven, Greg Bear, etc, since their books tend to be anchored in real science as much as possible.

In any case it would be really cool to see what things are like on these super earths that they are finding.

Originally posted by iforget


Its a fairly common theme in sci-fi. I often wonder that if humans are not well suited for colonizing other planets then perhaps we could at least seed microbes

Yes, or launch robots with cryogenized foetuses or fertilized eggs

And what makes you think, that there is not battles being fought out there around or on the way to these planets? I highly doubt we can handle the beef they're gonna be throwing.... Like paper bag shields vs ? High ultra reflective energetic shields? Not to mention the weapons... And yes I don't have to know them to not be human, to know they are gonna be packing heat, any intelligent species would.

We are simply just not ready to work together like we need to, so that we can even handle life here on earth, let alone in space, let alone in space battles.

They could have a religion, but it's not gonna agree with you, could be to eat you. You don't know how anything/one is gonna evolve into, look at us. lol

Wow.. Billions, there's plenty of choice of where to go once we've destroyed this planet then.

Except that because all these planets are bigger than the earth the gravity would be greater so we would all be to weak to move about on them.

Originally posted by PhoenixOD

Except that because all these planets are bigger than the earth the gravity would be greater so we would all be to weak to move about on them.

I think eriktheawful was pointing out the same issue in his post above... we may be able to move around just not as easily... after time we may evolve to counter act this issue by becoming shorter and stronger etc.

I'm not sure if any of that is actually possible.... does anyone know how strong the gravity would be and how much we could handle?

Of course we could always use mechanical legs and arms... like those from the Alien films I suppose.

I'm guessing if there were to be life on these planets already, they would be similar to insects/spiders... low centre of gravity but wide bases?

reply to post by II HAL II


Here's a link to G-Forces, Human tolerance.

If a planet has 4 times the mass of the Earth, basically you'd weigh 4 times as much. So if you're physically fit, and weigh let's say around 175 pounds, on that planet you'd weigh 700 pounds.

Obviously this is a huge stress on your muscles and the heart itself. I would speculate that anything over 2 Earth masses would be something we can't colonize unless some sort of "antigravity" devices are invented.

Oh, and I don't mean that life could not evolve there. But it would most likely be very different in many ways that life that develops in weaker gravity.

Ah! Also keep in mind that the planet's mass will depend upon what the planet is made up of, since mass and volume are not the same of course. Some of these planets could be bigger than the Earth, but actually have a mass that is the same or only a little higher, if the planet's materials are less dense. Say a planet that is 3 times the Earth's size, but it's mass is only 1.5 times that of Earth's, then you'd still weigh more, but only 1.5 times more, not 3.

Originally posted by II HAL II
Just have to watch out for the locals, and make a craft the can travel 30 light years and sustain man for a few generations.

That's what the said a few million years ago and who are now visiting our planet Just joking, sort of..