There are billions of life supporting Super-Earths in the Milky Way

[Bateluer]

http://lightyears.blogs.cnn.com/201...-habitable-zone-of-red-dwarf-stars/?hpt=us_t5

Xavier Bonfils, of the Observatoire des Sciences de l'Univers de Grenoble, France, said in a release that these new observations indicate that 40% of all red dwarfs have rocky planets orbiting in their habitable zones. Our own sun is a hotter G V, or yellow dwarf, star and is more than twice as massive as a red dwarf.

Because about 80% of stars in the Milky Way are red dwarfs (also referred to as M-class stars), this leads to the conclusion that tens of billions of rocky planets exist in habitable zones in our galaxy. The Jupiters and Saturns of the galaxy, which are more massive and gaseous giants, are more rare around red dwarfs.

A lot of these promising planets are relatively nearby neighbors. The estimates suggest that there are 100 super-Earths in habitable zones around stars 30 light years or less from us.

Right next door. I wish to purchase one now.

 

[sjwaste]

I heard of this one, called Erythro...

Seriously, though, I'm thinking there's a lot more to life than a rocky planet the right distance from a star. Earth obviously has that, but we also have plenty of water, a magnetic field, active geology, and those are just terrestrial characteristics. We also have a single, proportionally large satellite that keeps our tilt stable and relatively small, as well as giving us moderate tidal activity. We have an ozone layer and a stable but energetic star. Then we have two gas giants with enough gravity to keep the inner solar system relatively clean.

There's a lot more to a planet being Earth-like than a rocky composition and its distance from its star. The more time I spend thinking about it, the crazier it sounds that we even have conditions that allow us to exist and contemplate it.

I'm pulling this number out of my ass, but despite how many rocky planets there may or may not be (we haven't really surveyed, but we're starting to), I'd be shocked if sentient life existed in more than a handful of places in a given galaxy. I don't doubt that plenty of planets are technically habitable, but I'm starting to think that life there is more likely to originate from here. I can't back that up, but too much has to go right to get from there to here.

 

[elmer92413]

I heard of this one, called Erythro...

Seriously, though, I'm thinking there's a lot more to life than a rocky planet the right distance from a star. Earth obviously has that, but we also have plenty of water, a magnetic field, active geology, and those are just terrestrial characteristics. We also have a single, proportionally large satellite that keeps our tilt stable and relatively small, as well as giving us moderate tidal activity. We have an ozone layer and a stable but energetic star. Then we have two gas giants with enough gravity to keep the inner solar system relatively clean.

There's a lot more to a planet being Earth-like than a rocky composition and its distance from its star. The more time I spend thinking about it, the crazier it sounds that we even have conditions that allow us to exist and contemplate it.

I'm pulling this number out of my ass, but despite how many rocky planets there may or may not be (we haven't really surveyed, but we're starting to), I'd be shocked if sentient life existed in more than a handful of places in a given galaxy. I don't doubt that plenty of planets are technically habitable, but I'm starting to think that life there is more likely to originate from here. I can't back that up, but too much has to go right to get from there to here.

Yes, for life here all of that is true... But we are also finding out that life can exist in circumstances that we previously did not believe it could. So that list of criteria you give could in fact only be descriptive of our particular form of life and may not fit so well with other forms that exist. Certainly though if we found a planetary system that mirrored our own we could probably guess that life has a good chance of occurring there, but right now we could not rule out the possibility that it also exists where we think conditions would not favor its existence. And with the sudden explosion in possibilities it is becoming more and more probable that we are not alone, which is... exciting to say the least.