Earth-sized worlds much more common than giant planets



By Pallab Ghosh for BBC News


28 October 2010


Nearly one in four stars like the Sun could have Earth-sized planets, according to a new estimate published in the journal Science. A US team has found that on average small, so-called rocky planets are much more common in orbit close to their star than giant planets planets similar in size to Jupiter. This estimate is based on observations from nearby stars taken by the twin 10-metre Keck telescopes in Hawaii. These show that 22 of the stars had detectable planets. The researchers estimated that about 1.6% of the Sun-like stars in their sample had Jupiter-size planets and 12% had so-called "super-Earths", which are between three and 10 times the mass of the Earth.


The Keck telescopes are not powerful enough to detect planets that are any smaller, so the scientists have assumed that this trend toward more smaller planets continues and estimated that 23 of the stars had Earth-sized planets. Dr Andrew Howard, from the University of California at Berkeley, admits that the estimate is currently impossible to back up using existing data. However, he says it is the first estimate that has been obtained using observations of relatively small planets. "This extrapolation is the least certain part of our analysis. The true answer might be one in eight or one in two - but we know that it isn't one in 100," he told BBC News.


Based on these statistics, Dr Howard says that Nasa's Kepler space telescope - which is to to survey 156,000 stars - will detect between 120 and 260 "plausibly terrestrial worlds. If there's life out there, it's most likely that it exists on rocky planets like our own Earth. So if there are more rocky small planets out there, then it seems more likely that there's life out there too," he said. But according to Dr Robert Massey of the Royal Astronomical Society, most of the worlds they predict exist would be too close to be habitable. "We probably need to wait a bit longer before we find a significant number of 'Earths' in habitable zones of their parent stars."


[OK, so we’re still very much in the realm of speculation at this point but the circumstantial evidence pointing to life elsewhere is steadily accumulating. If small rocky planets are more common that the super gas giants and those are fairly common – as these things go – then it looks likely that life has plenty of spots out there in which to emerge just as we did. I’m confident that life exists elsewhere in the galaxy. It’s really just a matter of time until we find it – or until it finds us.]