I continue with my talk about extraterrestrial life on this blog with this post. It was actually inspired by an article that I read in the Minneapolis StarTribune while eating breakfast this morning about astronomers discovering more signs that supports the idea of numerous planets in the Universe. It basically sheds light on the debate about life outside of our own and makes us realize that we have only just begun looking and just in our backyard (in terms of the size of the universe I mean).
Even with all the advances in technology that have been made in the last two decades, the contemporary tools that are used in space exploration are found wanting because they can only really spot large exo planets like Jupiter for example by observing the fluctuations in brightness of distant stars. But, NASA’s Kepler spacecraft mission is indeed a success and has changed astronomy completely with astronomers stating that stars in just our own galaxy, the Milky Way, could have 1.6 planets on average.
You might be wondering why I headlined this blog post as “Science fiction becoming a science fact again”. It’s because of this discovery that was reported on the Scientific American – a great magazine, by the way – about two planets, Kepler-34 b and Kepler-35 b, that orbit two stars. Sort of like the desert world in the Star Wars saga called Tatooine. Check out this image below of a very popular scene from the series in the ‘A New Hope’ episode.
This is pretty incredible to me and it makes me wonder as great as the human species is, is there are anything better out there.