Earth’s the right place for love; I don’t know where’s it’s likely to go better…” – Robert Frost, “Birches”
Earth may be the right place for love, as Robert Frost [Unlink] wrote, but if scientists looking to the skies are correct, there could be up to 100 million life-supporting planets in the Milky Way galaxy for earthly lovers of the future to visit on romantic getaways and high-tech honeymoons.
In late May, an international team of astronomers published a Biological Complexity Index “designed to provide a quantitative estimate of the relative probability that complex, macro-organismic life forms could have emerged on other worlds,” according to the article’s abstract. It was published in a special astrobiology issue of the open-access journal Challenges.
As more multiplanetary systems are discovered, it’s only natural for humans to wonder if any of those worlds could sustain life. The astrophysicists who produced the article, however, did more than wonder. Using a new computation method that takes into account data from planets orbiting stars other than the sun, they determined that about 100 million planets in the Milky Way could support life beyond the microbial level.
That doesn’t mean, however, that all those planets harbor life forms that might be interested in welcoming newlywed earthlings.
“This study does not indicate that complex life exists on that many planets. We’re saying that there are planetary conditions that could support it. Origin of life questions are not addressed – only the conditions to support life,” the paper’s authors wrote. The international effort included contributions by lead author Louis Irwin of the University of Texas at El Paso; Alberto Fairén, a Cornell research associate; Abel Méndez, from the University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo; and Dirk Schulze-Makuch, from Washington State University.
The scientists surveyed data on more than 1,000 planets and developed a formula that “considers planet density, temperature, substrate (liquid, solid or gas), chemistry, distance from its central star and age” in developing the BCI, a Cornell news release stated.
According to the BCI calculation, 1 to 2 percent of the planets had a BCI rating higher than Jupiter’s moon Europa, which is believed to have a subsurface global ocean that could harbor life.
The number of planets that could support complex life according to the BCI is relatively low, but when one takes into account that the Milky Way may have as many as 100 billion planets, the number of potential life-supporting planets starts to add up in a big way.
“Our model calculations indicate that complex life may be rare in frequency, but extremely abundant in absolute numbers,” the scientists wrote, “suggesting the possibility of as many as 100 million planets in our galaxy on which significant biological complexity could have evolved.”
The researchers received no external funding for the article, the Cornell news release stated.
Leave a reply