New Estimate for Alien Earths: 2 Billion in Our Galaxy Alone

Using the prolific planet hunting Kepler spacecraft, astronomers have discovered 1,235 candidate planets orbiting other suns since the Kepler mission's search for Earth-like worlds began in 2009.
To find them, Kepler monitors a rich star field to identify planetary transits by the slight dimming of starlight caused by a planet crossing the face of its parent star.
In this remarkable illustration, all of Kepler's planet candidates are shown in transit with their parent stars ordered by size from top left to bottom right.
Simulated stellar disks and the silhouettes of transiting planets are all shown at the same relative scale, with saturated star colors. Of course, some stars show more than one planet in transit, but you may have to examine the picture at high resolution to spot them all.

For reference, the Sun is shown at the same scale, by itself below the top row on the right. In silhouette against the Sun's disk, both Jupiter and Earth are in transit.



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Roughly one out of every 37 to one out of every 70 sunlike stars in the sky might harbor an alien Earth, a new study reveals.

These findings hint that billions of Earthlike planets might exist in our galaxy, researchers added.

These new calculations are based in data from the Kepler space telescope, which in February wowed the globe by revealing more than 1,200 possible alien worlds, including 68 potentially Earth-size planets. The spacecraft does so by looking for the dimming that occurs when a world transits or moves in front of a star.

Scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., focused on roughly Earth-size planets within the habitable zones of their stars — that is, orbits where liquid water can exist on the surfaces of those worlds.

After the researchers analyzed the four months of data in this initial batch of readings from Kepler, they determined that 1.4 to 2.7 percent of all sunlike stars are expected to have Earthlike planets — ones that are between 0.8 and two times Earth's diameter and within the habitable zones of their stars.

"This means there are a lot of Earth analogs out there — two billion in the Milky Way galaxy," researcher Joseph Catanzarite, an astronomer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told SPACE.com. "With that large a number, there's a good chance life and maybe even intelligent life might exist on some of those planets. And that's just our galaxy alone — there are 50 billion other galaxies."

See here for the end of this paper.

good thread but the way i feel about them by putting this out there is that people should already know this without having to be told...everyone smart enough to read should already know how vast the universe or even just our galaxy alone is...its just using common sense..how could people think about all them stars and galaxies and think that there wouldnt be the possibiltie of hundreds of millions or billions of planets like ours...its not like the only water in the universe is only on earth so as long as there is water in which im sure there is an infinite amount and theplanet being about the right distance away from its star then it just comes down to simple math to be able to figure out that were just a single yeast particle in a giant ball of dough

reply to post by gdaub23

Definitely agree with you.

It is nice to put a visual image to the others "Earth" anyway.

Here are the comments of the guy who have made this composition:

This picture shows every Kepler planetary candidate host star with its transiting companion in silhouette. The sizes of the stars and transiting companions are properly scaled. The colours of the stars are meant to represent how the eye would see the star outside of the Earths atmosphere.
Stars have been properly limb darkened and the companions have been offset relative to one another to match the modeled impact parameter. Some stars will even show more than one planet! The largest star is 6.1 times larger that the Sun and the smallest stars are estimated to be only 0.3 times the radius of the Sun. The Sun is shown below the top row on the right by itself with the Earth and Jupiter in transit Don't forget to check out the high-resolution version, which is necessary to see some of the smallest planetary candidates

Link to the high-resolution version.

It worth a look, IMO

reply to post by elevenaugust


I made a thread on this over a week ago.

Link to it here this thread should therefore be closed
www.abovetopsecret.com...

reply to post by gdaub23


the people should just know this how?
what are the implications of lots of earth like planets?
earth likedoes that mean life?

xploder
star n flag

You know looking at this along with the knowledge that our technology is so limited, even though it has come far since the first space missions, it's kind of humbling. Here we are billions of miles away from these places, and not likely to visit any of them soon. I think we have some brilliant people in this world to figure out the solution of traveling these vast distances, just not the money to support their research. But I guess it's human complacency setting in, we are content with the little we have, and we aren't ready to shake it up now, even for the possibility of something better.

a reply to: XPLodER

i am a member of planethunters (kepler mission analyst). we have over 2000 confirmed planets of all sizes, 8 confirmed earthlikes and 13 possible. we suspect even close as 5-15ly. any help is welcomed and so far over 300.000 volunteers have worked on project in some capacity.

earthlike means rocky, 0.5 to 2 of earths radius/gravity, in habitable zone (goldilocks, not to cold/hot, liquid water possible). with launch of james webb space telescope we will have ability to detect composition of atmosphere from distant planets which will give us some more info.