Get your brains around this..."Milky Way Contains At Least 100 Billion Planets, New Analysis Finds"

[NRaleighLiberal]

http://idealab.talkingpointsmemo.com/2013/01/milky-way-contains-at-least-100-billion-planets-new-analysis-finds.php?ref=fpnewsfeed

"The Milky Way contains at least 100 billion planets, or enough to have one for each of its stars, and many of them are likely to be capable of supporting conditions favorable to life, according to a new estimate from scientists at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California (Caltech).

That specific figure of 100 billion planets has been suggested by earlier, separate studies, but the new analysis corroborates the earlier numbers and may even add to them, as it was conducted on a single star system — Kepler 32 — which contains five planets and is located some 1,000 light years away from Earth in between the patch of sky found between the constellations Cygnus and Lyra, where NASA’s planet-hunting Kepler Space Telescope is pointed.

In fact, the new star census estimate, which came after scientists verified three of the five planets around the star Kepler 32, is strictly conservative, according to the Caltech astronomers who developed it after studying the Kepler 32 system.

“There’s room for these numbers to really grow,” said Jonathan Swift, a Caltech astronomer who is the lead author on a paper on the new findings, in a phone interview with TPM. “They’re not going to shrink. Our calculation is new in the sense that we are making the calculation of planets in compact systems around the most populous type of stars in the galaxy.”

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and...there are countless galaxies out there....do the math! These types of things truly boggle the mind!

[Kalidurga]

1. Okay I tried.

I failed. But, this is something fun to think about.

[freshwest]

2. Uh, do I havta? Not good with numbers...

[DreamGypsy]

3. Approximately the same number of planets in the Milky Way...

Last edited Thu Jan 3, 2013, 06:12 PM - Edit history (1)

...as there are neurons in the human brain. Not such a big number...you could count them in only 3100 years (at 1 second per planet (or neuron)).

And likely less than the number of bacteria in a typical human body.

Definitely fewer planets than the 100 trillion estimated synapses in the human brain ... would require 31 million years to count those.

Yes, there are around 80 billion galaxies in the observable universe (countable in 2500 years or so), but what's a few orders of magnitude among friends???

As Neil deGrasse Tyson writes:

Some people are upset by this. Don’t be. There’s another way to look at it. It’s not as though we’re down here on Earth and the rest of the universe is out there. To begin with, we’re genetically connected to each other and to all other life-forms on Earth. We’re mutual participants in the biosphere. We’re also chemically connected to all the other life-forms we have yet to discover. They, too, would use the same elements we find in our periodic table. They do not and cannot have some other periodic table. So we’re genetically connected to each other; we’re molecularly connected to other objects in the universe; and we’re atomically con­nected to all matter in the cosmos.

For me, that is a profound thought. It is even spiritual. Science, enabled by engineering, empowered by NASA, tells us not only that we are in the universe but that the universe is in us. And for me, that sense of belong­ing elevates, not denigrates, the ego.

[joshcryer]

6. Few orders of magnitude = around 8 sextillion solar systems.

It's still a great observational leap, imo.

[Viva_La_Revolution]

8. We are all Stardust

LITERALLY. I find that to be beyond cool.

[freshwest]

10. +1,000

[freshwest]

9. Um, I really love the way that man thinks.

[Skittles]

4. where is Carl Sagan when we need him

[shenmue]

5. So, when is Zaphod Beeblebrox going to get here?

Oh boy.

[Odin2005]

7. I wish Sagan were still around to see this!