Photo- One Billion Stars- Ten years in the making

[Ichingcarpenter]

Milky Way image reveals detail of a billion stars

Preview of the billion-star image. The full image contains 150 billion pixels, and the detail it contains is only revealed by the three zoom levels, which are centred on G305, a large and complex star-formation region. The innermost zoom covers a tiny fraction of the full image, but still contains more than ten thousand stars.

Scientists created the colour picture by combining infra-red light images from telescopes in the northern and southern hemispheres. Large structures of the Milky Way galaxy, such as gas and dust clouds where stars have formed and died, can be seen in the image.

The picture represents part of a 10-year project involving scientists from the UK, Europe and Chile, who gathered data from the two telescopes. The information has been processed and archived by teams at the Universities of Edinburgh and Cambridge, who have made it available to astronomers around the world for further studies.




must be viewed at the link to show the details: http://www.physorg.com/news/2012-03-milky-image-reveals-billion-stars.html

[gateley]

1. And we think the universe is all about us.

Thanks for this -- amazing!!

[longship]

2. Cool post!

R&K

[Broderick]

3. There's life out there

I can't see how there can't be. Billions upon billions upon billions of stars in the milky way alone. I would even venture to say our solar system is rather lifeless in total when compared to some others.

[Ichingcarpenter]

4. Study indicates existence of billions of habitable alien planets in Milky Way

Source: The Christian Science Monitor

There should be billions of habitable, rocky planets around the faint red stars of our Milky Way galaxy, a new study suggests.

Though these alien planets are difficult to detect, and only a few have been discovered so far, they should be ubiquitous, scientists say. And some of them could be good candidates to host extraterrestrial life.

The findings are based on a survey of 102 stars in a class called red dwarfs, which are fainter, cooler, less massive and longer-lived than the sun, and are thought to make up about 80 percent of the stars in our galaxy.

Using the HARPS spectrograph on the 3.6-metre telescope at the European Southern Observatory's La Silla Observatory in Chile, astronomers found nine planets slightly larger than Earth over a six-year period. These planets, called super-Earths, weigh between one and 10 times the mass of our own world, and two of the nine were discovered in the habitable zone of their parent star, where temperatures are right for liquid water to exist.

Read more: http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2012/0328/Study-indicates-existence-of-billions-of-habitable-alien-planets-in-Milky-Way


If just .001 had intelligent life that's 10 million planets