Three "Super-Earths" found circling a Sun-like star

Planets all over the universe! The most interesting comment I found in this article was: "In addition, HARPS astronomers have tallied about 45 new candidate planets with a mass below 30 Earth masses and an orbital period shorter than 50 days. The researchers say the deluge implies one out of every three sun-like stars harbors such planets."

One in every three Sun like stars that were analyzed by these researchers had a planet around them. Lets have some fun with math and astound ourselves...

Estimated number of galaxies in the universe: 125,000,000,000 (source: NASA)
Average number of stars in a galaxy: 100,000,000,000 - (source: Cornell University)
Guestimation of the total number of stars in the universe: 12,500,000,000,000,000,000,000

How many Sun likes stars are in the universe with planets? Lets say that 1/1000 of 1 percent of all stars are like our Sun and 1% of stars like ours have rocky super-Earth like planets - that leaves 1,250,000,000,000,000.

Thats a big number.

Do you believe?




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Home sweet home...

I always thought I was from another place far, far away... Now we know.

Scientists believe that our little region of space objects didn't come from the Milky Way. We were actually pulled from a small galaxy that we are crashing with over millions (billions) of years. The little orange dot below notes approximately where we are located. The red dots note the left overs of the galaxy we are/were a part of. The evolution of space. Just as smooth, structured and chaotic as our own planet. A microcosm with a microcosm. Its all makes such complicated, smooth sense.

My thoughts on the news this evening...

We live in space. For limited periods of time and under very defined and limiting set of rules. In time, probability willing, we might master the process and make it a commodity to be accepted as commonly as floating in a boat. A little farther down the larger number of us might live in the sky and look at land based existence as the aberration. The pictures to the left show some amazing thing. Makes me think of something else I once watched on the tube...human spirit (and maybe stupidity). We humans do random incomprehensible things in random instances. We build upon each other.

I stare at global climate change and I think about our species pushing along and trying to get into space maybe as an escape. Maybe (as many of these scientists like to think) there are a multitude of universes and our universe happens to have a set of properties which makes it very costly to get into space and as a result no other race in the universe has gotten there yet and the future is peering back hoping we are to be the first.

You see us building pretty neat things these days hoping to keep from killing ourselves. Our houses have finally become more important. They are off to a good start. These gentlemen have a carbon neutral house. Why only neutral? Why not build the house that has a negative carbon footprint? The technology, tweaked here and there (big tweaks of course, nonetheless tweeks), is already here. Solar power. Wind power. Biomass energy. All making hydrogen stored in tanks spread in small volume tanks (just in case anyone begins to worry about blowing up their neighborhood).

I have confidence. I am wary. I wonder of the true potential and what we will find once we get there. Will we skip over it as we learn to leap beyond it?

Little Baby Steps

Space FUNGI!!

As weird as it does sound...we will leave this planet (hopefully) one day in search of another. We will probably already have a few planets in mind as we leave. The trip will be significant. We will live, breath and be born elsewhere in the universe. The Human Race of planet Earth circling Sol.

Little baby steps.