Nyx, a vast new stellar stream discovered in the vicinity of the Sun, named after the Greek goddess of the night, may provide the first indication that a dwarf galaxy had merged with the Milky Way disk. These stellar streams are thought to be globular clusters or dwarf galaxies that have been stretched out along its orbit by tidal forces before being completely disrupted.
There’s been increasing speculation that many of the Milky Way’s more than 4,100 known exoplanets might resemble the ocean worlds of Jupiter’s storied moon Europa and Saturn’s Enceladus. “So if we’re thinking about these places as being possibly habitable, maybe bigger versions of them in other planetary systems are habitable too,” says NASA’s Lynnae Quick about planets with oceans that may be orbiting many of our galaxy’s one trillion stars.
New research based on huge simulations involving hundreds of processors on the Australian National Computing Infrastructure using parameters run through a unique geodynamics code simulating the development of the interior of planets, showed that many early planets would have tended to develop a magnetic field and plate tectonics than planets formed later in the Milky Way, which is favorable to the development of life.
“Plumes of water erupt from Europa and Enceladus, so we can tell that these bodies have subsurface oceans beneath their ice shells, and they have energy that drives the plumes, which are two requirements for life as we know it,” says Lynnae Quick, a NASA planetary scientist who specializes in volcanism and ocean worlds, about speculation that many of the more than 4,000 known exoplanets might resemble some of the watery moons around Jupiter and Saturn. “So if we’re thinking about these places as being possibly habitable, maybe bigger versions of them in other planetary systems are habitable too.”
Andrew Siemion, director of the University of California Berkeley SETI Research Center, recently wrote in an email to The Daily Galaxy that “I suspect there are other intelligent civilizations in the Milky Way Galaxy– we just need to look!” Now, new calculations place an upper limit of 0.18 Earth-like planets per G-type star in our Galaxy, according to University of British Columbia researcher Michelle Kunimoto about six billion rocky, Earth-sized planets orbiting in the habitable zones of Sun-like (G) stars in the Milky Way.
New research suggests that searches for extraterrestrial intelligent civilizations not only reveals the existence of how life forms, but also gives us clues for how long our own civilization will last, according to astrophysicist Christopher Conselice, based on the hypothesis that it takes 5 billion years for intelligent life to form on exoplanets, as it did on Earth.
