Sensational data from the Kepler Space Telescope are reassuring to those hungry for contact.
NASA's Kepler space telescope has detected 1,235 exoplanets in just 136 days. And this is after surveying a relatively small section of our Milky Way galaxy. No more than four hundred parts of the celestial sphere fell into the field of view. Specifically, the zone where the constellation Cygnus is located.
Of the 1235 planets, 54 are most likely located in the so-called "zone of life". That is, they are comfortably located near their stars. Like our Earth. As a last resort, like Mars.
The collected data concerning not only the location of the planets, but also their sizes, made it possible to draw statistical conclusions. And build a computer model based on them. And with its help, calculate how many worlds can be inhabited.
Earth-like planets, or even better, exist in more than a billion stars in our galaxy
Model of Habitability Within the Milky Way Galaxy is the title of the study by Michael Gowanlock of the University of Hawaii's. And according to the calculations, in our galaxy, 1.2 percent of the stars should have habitable planets.
If we recall that there are about 100 billion stars in the Milky Way, then there are more than a billion planets capable of supporting life. In the constellation Cygnus, therefore, there are 12-13 of them.
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Michel also took into account the fact that in some worlds the local “End of the World” could come - like a nearby supernova explosion that destroyed all life with radiation. But even such events, which are not so rare in our galaxy, do not greatly reduce the number of potentially inhabited worlds.
“The Milky Way is so old,” says the scientist, “that the planet that has lost its life has enough time to revive it. And bring it to a very high level. Up to civilized.
Milky Way: we are not on the outskirts
The model shows that closer to the center of the galaxy the chances of finding habitable planets are higher than in the outskirts.
By the way, we are not located in the very outskirts, as science fiction writers sometimes think. If we imagine the "vortex" of the Milky Way as Moscow, then our Sun together with the Earth will be a little further than the third transport ring: somewhere near the Akademicheskaya metro station.
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How does he look in a distant land?
The Kepler orbiting telescope searches for exoplanets using the so-called transit method. That is, it monitors whether the brightness of the star changes from time to time. And it changes when planets pass along the disk of the star. Astronomers determine the presence of planets by fluctuations in brightness.
Inhabited planets, on which life for some reason died, had a chance to “start all over again”. The end of the world is not forever
Vladimir LAGOVSKY