Super-Earths 'in the billions' (BBC)

[eppur_se_muova]

By Jonathan Amos
Science correspondent, BBC News, Manchester

There could be many billions of planets not much bigger than Earth circling faint stars in our galaxy, says an international team of astronomers.

The estimate for the number of "super-Earths" is based on detections already made and then extrapolated to include the Milky Way's population of so-called red dwarf stars.
***
Harps employs an indirect method of detection that infers the existence of orbiting planets from the way their gravity makes a parent star appear to twitch in its motion across the sky.

"Our new observations with Harps mean that about 40% of all red dwarf stars have a super-Earth orbiting in the habitable zone where liquid water can exist on the surface of the planet," said team leader Xavier Bonfils from the Observatoire des Sciences de l'Univers de Grenoble, France.

"Because red dwarfs are so common - there are about 160 billion of them in the Milky Way - this leads us to the astonishing result that there are tens of billions of these planets in our galaxy alone."
***
more: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17532470




So ... where is everybody?

[Speck Tater]

1. And on every one of these planets where Republicans evolved...

the inhabitants will never be able to evolve beyond the stone age.

[iscooterliberally]

2. HA!!

That was my very first thought too!

[gtar100]

3. Sadly true. We are a terribly infected planet.

Fundamentalists, Conservatives, Republicans...all are an aberration of nature. Their minds are full of hate and fear of life itself, hence, they make a fearful world.

I hope more than a few of those billions of worlds holds life and consciousness that truly appreciates what's going on.

[DetlefK]

4. Here's where's everybody:

Several billion years ago: life happens on earth

Several tens of millenia ago: intelligent life evolves

Several centuries ago: passive exploration of the universe begins

Several decades ago: active exploration of the universe begins, accidential emission of interstellar messages begins



Imagine an ancient and wise alien civilization.
Imagine them building an interstellar empire.
Imagine the rise and decay of their species over the course of millions of years.
And now imagine their very last radio transmission rushing past earth, just a few days before we invented radios.

100 years are NOTHING in cosmological terms and almost nothing considered the life-span of a species. Even considered next to the life-span of a civilization, 100 years is minuscule.



Now imagine another alien civilization.
Young, barbaric, curious, just like mankind.
They started interstellar colonization a few hundred years ago.
They started sending accidential radio transmissions a few hundred years even before that.
And we don't know of their existence, because we are separated by a distance of 1000 light-years...