A Quote by Sir Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal of Great Britain



Telescopes are in some ways like time machines...
They reveal galaxies so far away that their light has taken billions of years to reach us. We in astronomy have an advantage in studying the universe, in that we can actually see the past. We owe our existence to stars, because they make the atoms of which we are formed. So if you are romantic you can say we are literally starstuff. If you're less romantic you can say we're the nuclear waste from the fuel that makes stars shine. We've made so many advances in our understanding. A few centuries ago, the pioneer navigators learnt the size and shape of our Earth, and the layout of the continents. We are now just learning the dimensions and ingredients of our entire cosmoc, and can at last make some sense of our cosmic habitat.



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Friday, October 1, 2010

Life on Alien Planet near Earth???

This is in continuation to my previous blog... Help yourself reading my previous blog too.

One of the planet's discoverers said in a briefing yesterday that "the chances of life on this planet(Gliese 581g) are 100 percent." How do we prove this? Scientists say there are several ways, but the best approach is as simple as "Listening for signals". This planet is 20.5 light years away from Earth, so human built probes won't be getting out there anytime soon :) By the way a light year is the distance traveled by light in 1 year.Anyway, I think along with me, a lot of people, would translate "the chances of life on this planet are 100 percent" to mean, "there's life on this planet."

It may not be what the scientist intended... Neither am I negative nor a critic, but I wish he'd chosen his words more carefully. One of the local TV news website had a headline based on this story that read "Scientists Discover Habitable Planet Near Earth."  Possibly ... but that's quite a bit presumptive at this point in time.


Courtesy: space.com




 

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