- Washington (ANI) -- A new theory suggests that chances
of life being found on other planets is one in four. This is a much higher
proportion than ever pronounced before.
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- The researchers Serge Tabachnik and Kristen Menou of
Princeton University in New Jersey, US, decided the race to detect an extrasolar
Earth-like planet is taking too long. So, instead of scanning the skies,
they modelled all the planetary systems known so far to work out which
could be hiding habitable planets.
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- According to a report in New Scientist, Tabachnik and
Menou created computer simulations of the 85 systems known in August 2002,
the time of their research, to narrow their search and estimate which might
harbour habitable planets.
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- The first thing they looked for in each system was whether
a small terrestrial planet could exist in a stable orbit. The gravitational
tugs exerted by gas giants can force smaller planets into unstable orbits
or eject them from a system altogether.
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- For a smaller world to be habitable, it must be far enough
away from its larger cousins so that their gravitational pull does not
seriously affect its orbit. The planet must also be within the "habitable
zone": the region surrounding a star within which a planet can support
liquid water at all times.
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- The researchers, the report adds, found that around a
quarter of the systems contained regions where life-friendly planets could
in principle exist. This is much higher than previously thought, says Tabachnik.
Extrapolated across the entire Galaxy, that makes a lot of new Earths.
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- Greg Laughlin from the University of California, Santa
Cruz, has done similar calculations with a smaller number of systems, and
agrees with these new results. "[They are] in line with what I would
have expected," he was quoted as saying in the report. (ANI)
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