I saw this today on Astronomy Picture of the Day and I remembered a particularly poignant moment out with my 10" telescope under a very dark sky scanning across the Milky Way. The number of stars visible in the scope was sorta like this picture - so, so many. Each little point of light a star. Some bigger, some smaller than our sun (actually, at that distance, most are bigger). And then to add to that the realization that over the last 20 years it seems at least half the stars we look at closely have planets*. And keeping in mind, the planets we can detect still tend to be big ones, not little rocky ones like our earth. So think in terms of some non-trivial fraction of these little tiny dots in this image has multiple planets orbiting it. All of these are places. Places that could be visited. Places with days, and suns that rise and set (well, if they are not tidally locked anyway). Mountains, valleys. Some of them have water on them, some of them are in the habitable zones for their stars with seas and atmospheres of one kind or another.
Who knows how many are habitable, but all of them are places as diverse as the places that exist in our own solar system and that we have only just begun to visit and to understand.
It is just amazing, and rather humbling. And it makes the idea that we are the only life God has created in this entire universe seem more than a bit silly. Especially understanding that the processes that formed this planet, our solar system, our sun, they have all happened trillions of times across this universe - across billions of years. The light of millions of stars captured in this one photo alone. In this photo we see that beginnings and the endings of those same processes. Great gas clouds waiting to be triggered into collapse, others right at the time the light left them forming stars and planets, and other - red giants - near the end of their life times, Some stars nearing their explosive ends getting ready to send new elements out into the void to make future planets and stars, or SN remnants or maybe even some white dwarfs. All in this one picture of one very, very small corner of a galaxy that is one of billions even trillions visible across our universe (with the appropriately sized telescope of course). More galaxies than stars countable in this image, almost all the visible ones with orders of magnitude more stars in them than are countable in this image.
M8-Pipe_APOD_GabrielSantosSmall.jpg
*if you do a search in 'number of stars with planets' you'll see many articles on the topic. Different estimates depending on the kind of planet you are asking about. But a conservative estimate for just having at least one planet is 50%, with the reality being that it is probably rarer for a star not to have planets than for it to have them.
Who knows how many are habitable, but all of them are places as diverse as the places that exist in our own solar system and that we have only just begun to visit and to understand.
It is just amazing, and rather humbling. And it makes the idea that we are the only life God has created in this entire universe seem more than a bit silly. Especially understanding that the processes that formed this planet, our solar system, our sun, they have all happened trillions of times across this universe - across billions of years. The light of millions of stars captured in this one photo alone. In this photo we see that beginnings and the endings of those same processes. Great gas clouds waiting to be triggered into collapse, others right at the time the light left them forming stars and planets, and other - red giants - near the end of their life times, Some stars nearing their explosive ends getting ready to send new elements out into the void to make future planets and stars, or SN remnants or maybe even some white dwarfs. All in this one picture of one very, very small corner of a galaxy that is one of billions even trillions visible across our universe (with the appropriately sized telescope of course). More galaxies than stars countable in this image, almost all the visible ones with orders of magnitude more stars in them than are countable in this image.
M8-Pipe_APOD_GabrielSantosSmall.jpg
*if you do a search in 'number of stars with planets' you'll see many articles on the topic. Different estimates depending on the kind of planet you are asking about. But a conservative estimate for just having at least one planet is 50%, with the reality being that it is probably rarer for a star not to have planets than for it to have them.
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