DawgTalkers.net Forums DawgTalk Tailgate Forum Cosmic Census of the Milky Way

Wow, this place s HUGE! lol

I knew this was an enormous galaxy, but 50 billion planets? At least 500 million in the right temperature zone to support life as we know it? That's astonishing! (and exciting)

Then figure in that scientists estimate that there are 100 billion galaxies in the universe ........

We may never be able to comprehend just how incredible and expansive our universe truly is.

http://www.kcci.com/r/26927152/detail.html

Cosmic Census Finds Crowd Of Planets In Our Galaxy

50 Billion Planets In Milky Way

SETH BORENSTEIN, AP Science Writer

WASHINGTON -- Scientists have estimated the first cosmic census of planets in our galaxy and the numbers are astronomical: at least 50 billion planets in the Milky Way.
At least 500 million of those planets are in the not-too-hot, not-too-cold zone where life could exist. The numbers were extrapolated from the early results of NASA's planet-hunting Kepler telescope.

Kepler science chief William Borucki says scientists took the number of planets they found in the first year of searching a small part of the night sky and then made an estimate on how likely stars are to have planets. Kepler spots planets as they pass between Earth and the star it orbits.

So far Kepler has found 1,235 candidate planets, with 54 in the Goldilocks zone, where life could possibly exist. Kepler's main mission is not to examine individual worlds, but give astronomers a sense of how many planets, especially potentially habitable ones, there are likely to be in our galaxy. They would use the one-four-hundredth of the night sky that Kepler is looking at and extrapolate from there.

Borucki and colleagues figured one of two stars has planets and one of 200 stars has planets in the habitable zone, announcing these ratios Saturday at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual conference in Washington. And that's a minimum because these stars can have more than one planet and Kepler has yet to get a long enough glimpse to see planets that are further out from the star, like Earth, Borucki said.

For example, if Kepler were 1,000 light years from Earth and looking at our sun and noticed Venus passing by, there's only a one-in-eight chance that Earth would also be seen, astronomers said.

To get the estimate for the total number of planets, scientists then took the frequency observed already and applied it to the number of stars in the Milky Way.

For many years scientists figured there were 100 billion stars in the Milky Way, but last year a Yale scientist figured the number was closer to 300 billion stars.

Either way it shows that Carl Sagan was right when he talked of billions and billions of worlds, said retired NASA astronomer Steve Maran, who praised the research but wasn't part of it.

And that's just our galaxy. Scientists figure there are 100 billion galaxies.

Borucki said the new calculations lead to worlds of questions about life elsewhere in the cosmos. "The next question is why haven't they visited us?"

And the answer? "I don't know," Borucki said.

I always love reading info on the universe, it's very fastinating. Thanks for posting

It's amazing to think that this planet is probably all we will ever experience in our lifetimes, and it seems so huge sometimes ...... yet it is such an infinitesimally small part of the overall universe.

I wonder what is ..... out there. Man I wish I was capable of finding out for myself.

Good night Ytown.

As amazing as it is to imagine the size of the Universe, I think it is equally amazing that, if some form of life does exist "out there," then why have we not come across it yet ?

Are they a bunch of senseless raccoons who do not have the brain power to develop advanced signal commmunication (?), or, are they so far technologically along, they're just patiently sitting out there waiting to turn on the particle beam annihilator and blast us to God (?)

I don't spend a lot of time worrying about it, but it is interesting.

For all we know, what we perceive as "background radiation" in space might be a message. We might just not have figured out how to translate it yet.

Most of what we have sent out into space is radio/television .... and who is to say if any other potential civilization might use such systems. Also, if someone is 3 or 4 galaxies over, then they are billions of light years away. For them to contact us, they would have to be billions of years ahead of us on an evolutionary scale, because signals, as we underatand them, would not reach us until billions of years after they were sent.

It's not as simple as "Is someone out there?" .... it is more "Is someone out there who is so far ahead of us that they can traverse incredible distances and back in less than a single lifetime?".

Frankly, I think that it is entirely possible that such journeys might not be possible in physical form, but might be possible in some form of mental projrction, and that may be why "we haven't seen anyone yet". "They" may have been here, but only on the periphery of human perception.

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I knew this was an enormous galaxy, but 50 billion planets?

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It is rather amazing.. what is also amazing is that if each planet would just give us $300.. we could pay off our national debt.

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Borucki said the new calculations lead to worlds of questions about life elsewhere in the cosmos. "The next question is why haven't they visited us?"

And the answer? "I don't know," Borucki said.

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Maybe they are here already. I think that's were the far left comes from

No matter how big you can comprehend, it is 1000x bigger.

Never ending is pretty darn big.



It's space....how does it ever end??



Nothingness is still something.

I get nuts trying to figure out where it is if there is an "end" or has some kind of boundary.

And, how the heck doesn't it have one ?

And, how was it created ?

Crazy,....

That's what I mean by crazy,...comprehending that it doesn't even have an end,...and then, we don't know whether it really does or not.

It's a hypocloid.

Baffling crazy !

It's probably why I believe in God.



Some things are beyond my compression so I go on Faith.