The numbers of stars alone is mind boggling. Add that most stars have about the same amount of planets as our solar system has then it's just crazy.
"Scientists have limited understanding of the origin of life on Earth" We understand a substantial amount, actually.
Fascinating results but boo to the Washington Post for reporting in a sloppy way. The early article has this exciting "one in every five sunlike stars" but there are about ten planets out of more than 3,500 that are earth-like in size and also in the habitable zone. Not exactly one in five. Again, it's still exciting, but Earth-like is still very rare. Less than 1% of the planets found by Kepler have any chance of being remotely like Earth.
I guess it's good to prove these things, but honestly who didn't know there were so many planets out there? Did any astronomer, cosmologist, etc. really think our solar system was something special and rare in the universe? I've known that there were hundreds of billions of planets in our own galaxy since I was a child. For every star (on average) IMO there are at least 10 planets.
Well, update: I just heard one of the lead authors on the radio, and he was sticking to this incredible 22% of sun-like stars have earth-mass planets in the habitable zone. That just seems ridiculous, but there it is! KingCheetah, isn't it still a tiny bit surprising given all the different models out there for planetary formation? For a while (before Geoff Marcy bascially), some well-regarded models thought planets were even rare, right?
I've always felt there were more planets than stars and anything that suggested otherwise I felt was silly. It sort of like sticking with the idea that there is only one universe -- when Hubble discovered that there were galaxies beyond the Milky Way it was thought that our galaxy was the entire universe. One of the next great discoveries of the 21st century will be the proof that our universe is only one trillions -- there is already circumstantial evidence through study of background radiation from the BB. As I recall there are hot spots in the radiation indicating that our universe is bumping into other universes.
Yeah... I don't know, Cheetah. String theorists would have you embrace multiverses instead of admitting that they have no testable work after many decades... a lot of very good physicists are skeptical. And yes, there are big time anomalies after the Planck satellite data, but "touching another universe" is just one (kind of vague and extreme) option, as I understand it from the theorists!
Yup, it is entirely possible that there are as many Big Bang complexes (what we call the Universe) in the blackness of space as there are galaxies in the perceivable universe. If energy can spontaneously appear here, why couldn't it appear other places? We know virtual particles pop into and out of existence all the time, it could happen on the Bing Bang scale too. Of course you'd never know because the light may never get here from a trillion light years away or be so faint as to be imperceptible. Neil deGrasse Tyson @neiltyson 44m If a football field were a timeline of cosmic history, cavemen to now spans the thickness of a blade of grass in the end zone
