Experts Reveal How Many Planets Exist in the Universe – Latest Updates

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CNN Indonesia

Monday, 22 April 2024 09:01 IWST

Jakarta, CNN Indonesia —

Textbooks say there are at least eight planet which is in the solar system today. But, how many planets are there really? universe?

Planetary research itself is one of the areas of research for astronauts to find other places to live if the Earth’s environmental conditions worsen.

The outdoor space itself is very, very large. There are about 100 billion stars in our own galaxy, the Milky Way, and there are probably trillions of galaxies in the universe.

Astronomers have so far discovered 5,502 planets around other stars called exoplanets in the Milky Way. Add to that the eight in our solar system, for a total of 5,510 known planets, all located in the Milky Way galaxy.

However, they believe there are many more planets out there that have not been discovered.

“Although we only know about 5,000 planets today, we can estimate that there is about one planet for every star,” said Mark Popinchalk, an astronomer at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. , announcing Living science.

He explained that it is not easy to determine the total number of exoplanets. Astronomers estimate that each star has about one planet based on observations.

Scientists use several different methods to find exoplanets, including the transit method used by the Kepler space telescope and the radial distance method that led to the discovery of Nobel Prize winner 51 Pegasi b.

With transits and radial distances, astronomers look at stars instead of planets, looking for faint signs of planets.

All planets discovered so far are within the Milky Way. No one has discovered planets outside the galaxy (sometimes called extroplanets), simply because they are so far away and so hard to see.

One technique, called microlensing, has revealed some exoplanets.

“In our own galaxy, the planets microlensing it was discovered when its host stars significantly bend the light of stars far behind them, and the planet’s mass adds a bit more to the lensing light,” said Yoni Brande, an astronomer at University of Kansas.

“Lensing has long been a part of the study of distant galaxies, so it stands to reason that we should be able to see faint planetary lensing signals in other galaxies as well, we just haven’t seen anything yet to be confirmed,” he continued.

Meanwhile, Popinchalk says that if our galaxy has about 100 billion planets and there are trillions of other galaxies, each of which probably has a lot of planets, then “We can multiply them together to 100 sextillion planets in the universe. Popinchalk said.

With such a large number of planets, people often argue that there must be at least one other planet with life somewhere in the universe.
However, astronomers still do not know how rare life is and the conditions necessary for it to arise – of course.

“We have to wait at least a few decades for the next generation of large exoplanet-focused space telescopes (such as the Ordinary World Observatory) to start looking for life elsewhere in the galaxy,” said Brande.

(rfi/dmi)