Miljarden planeten in het melkwegstelsel

De hemel is veel ‘aardser’ dan we dachten  

De astronomie komt met steeds meer bewijzen dat het heelal niet alleen miljoenen galaxies heeft bestaande uit miljoenen sterren, maar dat elke ster over heel wat planeten beschikt. Het esoterische beeld van de kosmos bestaande uit vaste sterren moet hoognodig aangepast worden. Ook de astrologie met haar oude wereldbeeld verdient een nieuwe gezichtshoek.

Graphic illustration by ESO/M. Kornmesser

Enkele uitspraken uit een bericht van ESO van vandaag:

“An international team, including three astronomers from the European Southern Observatory (ESO), has used the technique of gravitational microlensing to measure how common planets are in the Milky Way. After a six-year search that surveyed millions of stars, the team concludes that planets around stars are the rule rather than the exception. The results will appear in the journal Nature on 12 January 2012.

Over the past 16 years, astronomers have detected more than 700 confirmed exoplanets and have started to probe the spectra  and atmospheres of these worlds. While studying the properties of individual exoplanets is undeniably valuable, a much more basic question remains: how commonplace are planets in the Milky Way?

Arnaud Cassan (Institut dʼAstrophysique de Paris), lead author of the Nature paper, explains: "We have searched for evidence for exoplanets in six years of microlensing observations. Remarkably, these data show that planets are more common than stars in our galaxy. We also found that lighter planets, such as super-Earths or cool Neptunes, must be more common than heavier ones.

“We used to think that the Earth might be unique in our galaxy. But now it seems that there are literally billions of planets with masses similar to Earth orbiting stars in the Milky Way,” concludes Daniel Kubas, co-lead author of the paper."”