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by admin on 2009-08-30 15:56:25

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Subject :What if we find one?.. 2009-09-17 15:55:37

Josh G.

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Joined: 2009-08-30 19:27:46
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Qoute from the author of the book, "The Crowded Universe" (Basic Books), Alan Boss of the Carnegie institute expresses the impact of discovering a habitable planet.
"Once we find the first one we'll have made the point that they really are there. Just by finding the first one we'll able to immediately say, 'Well if we found one around a nearby star, just by multiplying the volume of the stars searched versus the ones that have not been searched, we can infer there must be billions and billions more of them just within our own galaxy.' So finding the first one will have enormous implications for how many there are in the entire galaxy as well as in the entire universe."
Boss came up with a rough number of ten thousand billion billion habitable planets in the observable universe by estimating that there is about one habitable planet around every sun-like star in the galaxy. There are about 10 billion of these sun-like stars, which Boss multiplies against the number of galaxies in the universe which scientists estimate to be about 100 billion.
http://www.livescience.com/space/090219-explanets-life.html

These are mathematical estimations and their significance is yet to be proven. If we find one, that means there are a couple of others in the universe waiting to be discovered.

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Subject :Re:What if we find one?.. 2009-12-18 03:33:43

Anne Jane C.

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Today I read about space exploration news: Is exoplanet a 'waterworld'? @ http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/41258

GJ 1214b is an exoplanet spotted by David Charbonneau and his colleagues at Harvard University together with researchers from US, Denmark, Switzerland and France. It's about 2.5 times the diameter of Earth and about 6.5 times the ma** of Earth. The parameters observed suggest that GJ 1214b has the same density as water. Can you believe that an exoplanet can actually be made up of liquid water? It says that although the temperature reaches 120 to 280 °C, the high gravitational field (high pressure) ensures liquid water. This is vital for life to be possible in a planet. I think its weird but absolutely possible.

Check out links to other news about space exploration @
http://www.goldilocksmission.com/news-and-updates/space-exploration-today.html

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