Approximately 22% of the stars you see at night have earth-like planets orbiting around them.

Please excuse me if this has already been posted. Earth-like, or rather, earth-sized planets are a lot more common than we once thought. So much so, that they may indeed fill up almost 1/4th of the night sky. 25 billion of them in the Milky Way alone. I personally think this news is beyond exciting!

What are your thoughts, ATS?

There has never been a doubt in my mind there are other earth like planets and intelligent life living on some of them. What will blow me away is when they discover one (exact location), and can check it out like we're doing with mars. I probably won't live to see that but maybe my kids will.

It should be "perhaps 22% of Sol-like stars", not stars in the night sky. There are lots of stars that HAVE no habitable zone at all.

In the Milky Way, about 7.5% of the stars are G types. So they're talking about 22% of 7.5%, or about 1.7%. That would make it more like 1 in 50 of the stars you see at night. Still a bunch, though.

Thread Already Started Here

And this one is under space Exploration too I can't believe you never seen it.

reply to post by mitman93

Interesting article but you shouldn't make up your own title which is different from what the article says. It's referring to stars like our sun, and you're referring to stars we can see at night. We see other stars at night which are not like our sun, so one doesn't necessarily infer the other. About 7.6% of stars in the Milky Way are the same yellow type as our sun according to this:

stellar classification

Moreover, the yellow-white, white, and blue-white stars are seen in greater frequency than their proportion would suggest, because they are typically brighter, so even the 7.6% figure is misleading if you're talking about what "stars you can see at night".

So, one calculation inferred from the article would be that 22% of sun like stars have Earth like planets orbiting them, and since 7.6% of stars in the Milky Way are the same type as our sun, this is only 1.67% of stars in the Milky Way. Of course they don't say what the percentage of Earth like planets are orbiting stars not like our sun, and besides it's sort of a shoot from the hip estimate anyway so there's no point in trying to be overly precise, but there is a difference between 22% versus 1.67% which matters even in a shoot from the hip estimate.

Anyway I liked the quote from Jill Tartar:

Jill Tarter, a pioneer in “SETI,” the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, said in an e-mail: “We haven’t yet found Earth 2.0, but these statistics suggest that it should be forthcoming, and soon. When we can point to Earth 2.0 in the sky, it will seem completely natural to ask ‘Does anybody live there?’ and ‘Can we go there?’ I think Earth 2.0 will concretize SETI as nothing else has.”

Edit: I see bedlam beat me to it and posted the same thing while I was still writing my reply. Way to go bedlam.

There are already two other threads on this... DId you miss them? See the Kepler, 10 new earths etc.. thread

Arbitrageur
reply to post by mitman93

 

Interesting article but you shouldn't make up your own title which is different from what the article says. It's referring to stars like our sun, and you're referring to stars we can see at night. We see other stars at night which are not like our sun, so one doesn't necessarily infer the other. About 7.6% of stars in the Milky Way are the same yellow type as our sun according to this:

stellar classification

Moreover, the yellow-white, white, and blue-white stars are seen in greater frequency than their proportion would suggest, because they are typically brighter, so even the 7.6% figure is misleading if you're talking about what "stars you can see at night".
'
So, one calculation inferred from the article would be that 22% of sun like stars have Earth like planets orbiting them, and since 7.6% of stars in the Milky Way are the same type as our sun, this is only 1.67% of stars in the Milky Way.

You are correct on the "at night" thing but you are wrong about the percentage of stars like our Sun.

8% of the stars in the Milky Way are G-class, another 3.5 are K-Class (very close to our Sun but longer lived). Those are the classes of stars that the statistic of 22% comes from.

So total, 11% or so of the stars in our Galaxy are widely considered "Sunlike".

You can see my calculation over in the original thread on this here: www.abovetopsecret.com...