Our Crowded Universe: Astronomer Alan Boss on Extrasolar Planets
Astronomer Alan Boss raced through Seattle the other day, like a life-bringing comet in search of a new planet. He stopped by Town Hall and shared the last ten years of planet hunting with a packed house.
Highlights:
Since 1996, over 340 new planets outside the solar system have been detected and more are found each day. Most are the size of Jupiter or bigger but a few super-Earths are out there, too.
NASAs Kepler mission, which launched March 6, will spend the next four years looking for Earth-like planets and use direct imaging to spot these faraway places where life might exist.
Kepler is going to pick 100,000 star systems to search for planets. And, the projection is by the end of its run, we could have up to 1,000 new Earth-like planets to search for life, intelligent or otherwise. They are all too far away to reach but we can see how big they are, what they are made of and if they have the necessary ingredients for life.
Bottom line:
The Universe is a big, big place and there our solar system isn’t the only place ripe for planet formation or the rise of life. It’s just a matter of pointing high-powered telescopes far enough into deep space to see what else is in our crowded universe.
Alan Boss and Alan Boss Q&A. Listen here.
Not only are we likely to have many habitable worlds but many of them are likely to be inhabited because of very simple physics. That’s not the same as saying they will have intelligent life or ET crawling all over them. I suspect they will have some primitive life.
—Alan Boss
One Response to “Our Crowded Universe: Astronomer Alan Boss on Extrasolar Planets”
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No life has ever been discovered beyond low Earth orbit, and this nut seems to think that a planet 600 light years away gives evidence that we live in a crowded universe. The evidence does not support the conclusion. Alan Boss has been nominated for the Divine Opinion Movement, King Stupid of the Day. Selling books does not a scientist make. He first has to make sense. By the way, it would take over 602 million years, traveling at the speed of the space shuttle, to get to Kepler-22b. Crowded. Right.