New Titius-Bode-Based Exoplanet Predictions – 2 Planets in the Habitable Zone of Each Star

Scientists Predict Earth-Like Planets around Most Stars

Astronomers estimate that the average star has approximately two planets in the habitable zone. Credit: Australian National University

Using the Titius-Bode relation and Kepler data, astronomers from Australian National University estimate that the standard star has about two planets in the habitable zone.

Planetary scientists have calculated that there are hundreds of billions of Earth-like planets in our galaxy which might support life.

The new research, led by Ph.D. student Tim Bovaird and Associate Professor Charley Lineweaver from The Australian National University (ANU), made the finding by applying a 200-year-old idea to the thousands of exo-planets discovered by the Kepler space telescope.

They found the standard star has about two planets in the so-called Goldilocks zone, the distance from the star where liquid water, crucial for life, can exist.

“The ingredients for life are plentiful, and we now know that habitable environments are plentiful,” said Associate Professor Lineweaver, from the ANU Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics and the Research School of Earth Sciences.

“However, the universe is not teeming with aliens with human-like intelligence that can build radio telescopes and spaceships. Otherwise, we would have seen or heard from them.

“It could be that there is some other bottleneck for the emergence of life that we haven’t worked out yet. Or intelligent civilizations evolve, but then self-destruct.”

The Kepler space telescope is biased towards seeing planets very close to their stars, that are too hot for liquid water, but the team extrapolated from Kepler’s results using the theory that was used to predict the existence of Uranus.

“We used the Titius-Bode relation and Kepler data to predict the positions of planets that Kepler is unable to see,” Associate Professor Lineweaver said.

The research will be published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Reference: “Using the Inclinations of Kepler Systems to Prioritize New Titius-Bode-Based Exoplanet Predictions” by Timothy Bovaird, Charles H. Lineweaver and Steffen K. Jacobsen, 13 March 2015, MNRAS.
DOI: 10.1093/mnras/stv221
arXiv: 1412.6230

4 Comments on "New Titius-Bode-Based Exoplanet Predictions – 2 Planets in the Habitable Zone of Each Star"

  1. I saw an ET space ship first when I was was 10 years old in small town Texas in 1958. It was nighttime and a bright spherical fairly large object was slowly silently floating above the trees in the woods across the street. Then the sphere broke into 5 smaller spheres going the same speed in the same direction as the larger sphere. I thought, “That’s not a plane, not a helicopter, not a meteorite, not a balloon; it must be one of those UFOs from another planet I’ve heard about. The newspapers of the 1950’s more openly reported on UFO sightings but then the government began suppressing information about visitation by extraterrestrial. Skeptics have not read the voluminous literature on ET visitation. Closed minds. Buddha was the first teacher on record over 2,500 years ago saying that the stars were other suns and that there were worlds like ours around those suns with other humans on those worlds.

    • I too saw a ufo,along with two other people,along the Ohio River in Ohio,about in 2000.It was as large as a railroad engine,and had a framework bearing bright fireworks-colored lights.It was moving slowly toward Kentucky,about a thousand feet above the ground.The same night, there were reports from north to south in Ohio of an object in the sky.No official has ever acknowledged this occurrence,although I did get a non-committal answer from an astronomer.

  2. One thing I think this article leaves out when talking about Goldilocks zones is that there are probably two. One around a star and the other around the galaxy, at least in spiral galaxies. It is highly likely that habitable planets for intelligent life can only form in the outer edges of a galaxy where its calm and life has a longer time to take hold and evolve. Whereas being closer to the center of the galaxy where it is still a pretty violent place, with stars moving at a much higher rate and interacting with each other much more frequent, not giving life a chance to get a foothold before some event happens that causes a mass extinction.

  3. Excellent article, i did read it two times so sorry for this,
    i have passed it on to my friends, so with a bit of luck they’ll get pleasure
    from it as well.

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