Just in case you still think we are alone in the Milky Way Galaxy, science comes around and smacks you in the face.
Our galaxy is home to about three hundred billion stars. That's a lot of stars. New research suggests that for every one of those stars, there may be a hundred thousand homeless planets wandering the galaxy. If you're counting, that's like 30,000,000,000,000,000 planets, and some of them may be home to life.
Astronomers at Stanford University arrived at their estimate of 100,000 nomad planets per star based on gravitation microlensing studies. Gravity, as you know, can twist and bend space, and when space bends, light also bends. When something that generates a significant amount of gravity (like a planet) passes in front of something like a star, the light from the star bends around the planet like the planet is a lens, and here on Earth, we can use the amount of bending to determine how big the planet is. A study from last year detected about a dozen nomadic planets this way, and the Stanford team extrapolated based on the known gravitational pull of the Milky Way galaxy, the amount of stuff available to make wandering planets, and how that matter might split up into objects ranging in size from Pluto to Jupiter.
As for the planets themselves, they might be rocky, icy, or gas giants. Nobody's sure where they would come from, or where they're going to. It's even possible that some of them might retain enough internal heat to have active plate tectonics, atmospheres, oceans, and even microbial life. We'll have to wait until some new telescopes come online in the early 2020s for confirmation that all of these things are actually out there, but if we start finding them, it could change our entire picture of the universe.
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With this information there is a sure bet that Neil deGrasse Tyson will be one of the scientists instrumental in finding out more information on these planets. This is definitely a discovery just as important as the Crystal Cave on Dantooine.
[Source: dvice]