LIFE ON BILLIONS OF PLANETS? COULD BE

STUDY ESTIMATES BILLIONS OF
‘HABITABLE’ MILKY WAY PLANETS

www.pcmag.com - Scientists have eagerly been searching for just one habitable planet beyond Earth, but could there actually be billions? According to new research from the European Southern Observatory’s High Accuracy Radical velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS), there are a number of rocky planets not much larger than Earth located in the “habitable zone” around faint red stars. There could be tens of billions of these planets in the Milky Way galaxy alone, HARPS said today, and about 100 in the Sun’s immediate vicinity. Red dwarf stars are the most common star in the Milky Way, and the HARPS team has been looking for exoplanets in their orbit. Specifically, they examined 102 red dwarf stars for a six-year period. They discovered nine super-Earths, or planets that are one to 10 times the size of Earth, including two inside the habitable zone.

“Our new observations with HARPS mean that about 40 percent of all red dwarf stars have a super-Earth orbiting in the habitable zone where liquid water can exist on the surface of the planet,” Xavier Bonfils with France’s Observatoire des Sciences de l’Univers de Grenoble and leader of the team, said in a statement. “Because red dwarfs are so common - there are about 160 billion of them in the Milky Way - this leads us to the astonishing result that there are tens of billions of these planets in our galaxy alone.”  In August, data gathered from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) suggested the possibility of flowing water on the Red Planet during the warmest months of the year. One of the planets identified is known as Gliese 667 Cc. It’s more than four times heavier than Earth, but has the right conditions for the existence of liquid water.

There could be many billions of planets not much bigger than Earth circling faint stars in our galaxy, says an international team of astronomers. The team works with the high-precision Harps instrument. The estimate for the number of “super-Earths” is based on detections already made and then extrapolated to include the Milky Way’s population of so-called red dwarf stars. Vedic scriptures explain that in the material world there are countless universes and planets and there is life in all of them.

WHAT DO THE VEDIC TEACHINGS TELL US? 

In modern so-called scientific society the idea is very prevalent that there is no life on other planets but that only on this earth do living entities with intelligence and scientific knowledge exist. The Vedic literatures, however, do not accept this foolish theory. The followers of Vedic wisdom are fully aware of various planets inhabited by varieties of living entities such as the demigods, the sages, the Pitās, the Gandharvas, the Pannagas, the Kinnaras, the Cāranas, the Siddhas and the Apsarās. The Vedas give information that in all planets - not only within this material sky but also in the spiritual sky - there are varieties of living entities. ... In the material world, distinctive features are manifested in different types of bodies in the various planets. We have full information from the Vedic literature that in each and every planet, both material and spiritual, there are living entities of varied intelligence.

Śrīla A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupāda :
Śrīmad Bhāgavatam 3.20.35-36
Canto 4: “Creation of the Fourth Order”
Chapter 20: “Lord Vishnu’s Appearance
in the Sacrificial Arena of Mahārāja Prithu”
Bhaktivedanta VedaBase