Scientists: extraterrestrial life may be removed from us by only 13 light-years
Researchers believe that habitable planets in the universe may be much closer to us than you can imagine - at a distance of only 13 light-years. Unless, of course, to base the position that the solar system is inhabited only Earth. According to scientists, about 6% of the known "red dwarf" contain around planets like the Earth, and many of them are also located at the optimum distance for life. With this statement in a recent issue of the scientific journal Astrophysical Journal were specialists from Harvard University. According to their research, the life in the universe may be much more common than we think, although to date, researchers have not found specific evidence of the presence of extraterrestrial biology.
"We now know for sure that planets like Earth, to the Universe are not something extraordinary. Accordingly, extraterrestrial life can also be much more common than we think," - says David Charbonneau, an astrophysicist at Harvard. However it is one thing to discover life in principle, but the other - to find it close enough for us to be able to study it in detail. Previously, the researchers conducted a search for extrasolar planets and have already seen how difficult it is to find rocky planets around distant stars. It is obvious that they discover life will at times difficult. Kepler telescope, operating in low Earth orbit, examined more than 150,000 stars.
Now scientifically confirmed that around these stars have at least 800 planets. Until about 3000 objects - this is the so-called candidate planets. however, in conjunction with other methods of finding exoplanets scientists received more impressive results and now modern science believes that an average of 1.6 stars have planets around them. But modern techniques allow the identification of mostly large planets close to their stars, but the small Earth-objects with a decent distance from the star is much more difficult to detect. However, scientists believe that given the number of stars in our galaxy, the Milky only one path can be about 17 billion planets. More recently, researchers have found that in our galaxy there are a lot of stars, brown dwarfs, which are also the planet in orbit.
According to rough estimates of Harvard scientists, about 75% of the stars in the Milky Way - it is just brown dwarfs. Now experts have studied only 95 brown dwarfs and found that 60% of them have planets around them are smaller than Neptune. Publication said that if all the brown dwarfs are equally dense planetonaselenie, planets, containing in itself some form of biology can be detected at a distance of no more than 600 light-years from Earth, which is very small in the comic's standards. Garvarskie experts, based on the current data on extrasolar planets, they say that in the Milky Way may be about 4.5 billion planets orbiting brown dwarfs, the closest such Earth-like planets may be removed from us by only 13 light-years.
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