Kiwi boffins bid up Earth-like planet prediction We'll see your lousy 17 billion Earth-like planets, Smithsonian, and raise you 83 billion: that's the message coming out of a New Zealand group that's proposing a new detection technique in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. The Japan-New Zealand collaboration proposes using gravitational micro-lensing in …
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I think you will find that 'sex' is Australian. Being from NZ, when I visit the UK I get endless requests asking what comes after five. When I reply 'six' the questioner always seems disappointed, especially if they were just nudging their mate.
Never mind, folk in the UK think Australia and NZ are the same place anyhow.
In the 1960s no one even knew if any other star had planes, let alone Earth mass and temperature.
Now we seem to be closing in on an actual number
That's pretty exciting. It also moves the debate from "Why leave the solar system, there's nowhere to go?" to "If we did leave the solar system, where should we go?"
And when they find a perfect planet, somebody is bound to say:
Yeah, but you know how it is with travel destinations: they look all shiny in the brochure, but when you get there the landing strip is awful, the customs officers rude, the taxi driver rips you of and drives you to your hotel which hasn't even been built yet, the sand on the beach scorching hot, but the sea is freezing cold for some reason, and it's polluted, and the Germans have taken all the towels and deckchairs, the food is awful and the toilets wont flush, the next-door kids will making far too much noise and the disco next door means you can't sleep a wink!
We might just as well stay at home or go to Southend-on-Sea
Such people should be sent of on a B-Ark to a small blue-green planet at the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the galaxy.
Oh, hang on.....
I agree. The formation of a star will inevitably leave loads of extra matter as dust/rocks etc. Gravity will ensure the extra matter coalesces into a stars satellites such as planets which may themselves have satellites as moons. So my guess is that most stars will have satellites by default. It's just that they're difficult to detect from our little outpost in the vastness of our own galaxy, let alone the universe.
To look outside of the Earth distance for Earth like planets is a very interesting idea as there are a lot of suns that are bigger than our planet (our sun is pretty middling on the solar scale), so if a planet is further away it might still be in the goldilocks zone (the goldilocks zone of that particular sun having moved further away from the sun due to the suns bigger energy output).
Very cool idea... 100 billion earth-like planets. For me, I think that pretty much answers the question of whether other intelligent life exists in the universe...
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