October 31, 2010

New estimate for the number of habitable planets in the Milky Way: 2.5 billion!

Check out this article from Bad Astronomer: How many habitable planets are there in the galaxy?
By now you may have heard the report that as many as 1/4 of all the sun-like stars in the Milky Way may have Earth-like worlds. Briefly, astronomers studied 166 stars within 80 light years of Earth, and did a survey of the planets they found orbiting them. What they found is that about 1.5% of the stars have Jupiter-mass planets, 6% have Neptune-mass ones, and about 12% have planets from 3 – 10 times the Earth’s mass.
This sample isn’t complete, and they cannot detect planets smaller than 3 times the Earth’s mass. But using some statistics, they can estimate from the trend that as many as 25% of sun-like stars have earth-mass planets orbiting them!
His conclusion: There are over 2.5 billion habitable planets in our Galaxy. Whoa, my mind just melted.

Read more.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Let's litter antz on "All" of them! And watch them grow like chea pets only with insects!

ZarPaulus said...

Particleion! I stopped following Transalchemy because it's degenerated into nothing more than an outlet for your god complex.

Though I do agree that we should colonize any planets without sapient life, assuming they still exist.