Bridging The Universal Divide
June 20th 2011 04:57
Category: Cosmic Objects
There is no question ,the universe is a great expanse yet despite the great distances involved new worlds are still being discovered.
Since the early 1990’s just a handful of distant planets were found, in the first decade of the twenty first century a little over 500 planets beyond our galaxy were discovered.
Finding new potential new worlds is helping to bridge the gap; it is making us think that we are not the only “world” in the entire universe.
While these new planets are being referred to as “worlds” these planets are very different than the world we know as Earth.
There is encouraging data that suggests that some of these world may have conditions that would support some form of life.
Since the launch of the Kepler spacecraft in 2009 the tally of new exoplanets has risen to over twelve hundred.
During the last three years or so a bevy of different planets were discovered some large some small and some the size of Earth.
Five of the planets are orbiting very close to the star Kepler 11 much like Mercury does in our solar system. A vast assortment of world have been discovered so far 90 to 95 percent are listed as being planets have some form of atmosphere.
Sixty-eight were found to be about the same diameter as Earth, with a further 280 odd planets deemed to be “Super Earth’s”. Another six hundred or so are Neptune size planets including over a hundred Jupiter class objects and a few significantly larger planets bigger than Jupiter.
Of the sixty or so Earth objects found, five are in what’s called the habitable zone in respective orbits around their sun’s.
The Kepler spacecraft has monitored around 160,000 stars in particular it found a star that is 2,000 light years from Earth named Kepler 11 that is very much like our Sun. Kepler 11 has six small planets orbiting the star ranging from 10 days to over 120 days. It is estimated that the planets are on average about 3.4 times the diameter of Earth.
It is not inconceivable that we may find a distant planet that may have life as we know with perhaps a civilization. Although we have not found any so far we are still in the early stages of finding new and exciting worlds in the not too distant future.
“Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. That’s Relativity”.
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Comment by S.L.
The Political Brief
Comment by CMoreStars
Astroearth
Camera Sense
Hi S.L.
Thank you for the comments. We have learned a great deal over the past 100 years how planets look like up close. We can see further into the past and see how the distant galaxies formed.
The advancements in research over the last 40 years has been frenetic, yet there is still much we don’t know. The search for knowledge and understanding will continue.