After a year in which scientists discovered several apparent planets outside the solar system, a new analysis concludes that folks, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
Hidden planets may be lurking around half the Milky Way galaxy’s 100 billion stars, the analysis suggests.
“We’ll see an explosion” in planet discoveries, said researcher Steven Beckwith of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany.
He presented the evidence for his optimism in Thursday’s issue of the journal Nature.
Scientists want to find distant planet systems not only for the tantalizing possibility of finding life, but also to test theories of how the solar system formed. There’s no direct way to tell now how many ordinary stars like the sun have planets.
For years, astronomers have believed that planets were rare. But the rush of reports in the past year has encouraged the belief that they are quite common, and Beckwith’s 50 percent estimate fits in with that thinking, said Steve Maran, assistant director of space sciences at the Godddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.
In the Nature article, Beckwith and Sargent analyze previous studies to argue that a lot more planets are out there.
They note that in several regions of the cosmos, half or more of very young stars show signs that they’re surrounded by disks of gas and dust that look like the forerunner of the solar system.
Scientists believe that when the sun was young, a disk of gas and dust surrounded it like a huge spinning pizza. Dust in this disk started to clump up, and some of these clumps grew into planets.
