Where to find life in the Milky Way galaxy
A paper published today on the Los Alamos astro-ph preprint website has attempted to model the habitable zones within the Milky Way galaxy. From the abstract:
We predict that ~1.2% of all stars host a planet that may have been capable of supporting complex life at some point in the history of the Galaxy. Of those stars with a habitable planet, ~75% of planets are predicted to be in a tidally locked configuration with their host star. The majority of these planets that may support complex life are found towards the inner Galaxy, distributed within, and significantly above and below, the Galactic midplane.[emphasis mine]
They took into consideration the hazard of supernovae for killing off planetary life, as well as other factors such as the where the necessary heavier elements would be available for producing planets.
You can download the paper here [pdf].
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
A paper published today on the Los Alamos astro-ph preprint website has attempted to model the habitable zones within the Milky Way galaxy. From the abstract:
We predict that ~1.2% of all stars host a planet that may have been capable of supporting complex life at some point in the history of the Galaxy. Of those stars with a habitable planet, ~75% of planets are predicted to be in a tidally locked configuration with their host star. The majority of these planets that may support complex life are found towards the inner Galaxy, distributed within, and significantly above and below, the Galactic midplane.[emphasis mine]
They took into consideration the hazard of supernovae for killing off planetary life, as well as other factors such as the where the necessary heavier elements would be available for producing planets.
You can download the paper here [pdf].
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
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