As I have been telling my readers, the universe is filled with life. Some of it is intelligent life. Some of these species may be younger than we are. Some may be the same age of Humans on Earth. But many may be far older than we are by million or even billions of years. Just because people on Earth cannot find a way to go from one star system to another does not mean that other intelligent species have not found a way.
The argument has been that the Solar System is the only place where you can find planets. In the past 20 years, 800 planets outside our Solar System have been publically found. Below, you can read about two of the most unusual planets found so far.
Planet with four suns
You may recall a scene from "Star Wars" where Luke Skywalker looks out across the landscape of a planet called Tatooine, which had two suns. This year, amateur scientists discovered that in reality, there is a planet with not just two, but four, suns.
This planet, called
PH1, is special for another reason: It's the first confirmed planet that the Planet Hunters group has identified. Planet Hunters is a citizen science organization, made of people just like you, who are combing through planet data. The group has also helped identify several planet candidates. Learn more at planethunters.org.
Alpha Centauri about 4.5 Light Years away
Nearby star has a planet
The closest planet we know of to Earth, outside of our solar system, was identified in October. This planet orbits a star called Alpha Centauri B. It's unlikely to harbor life, but there's hope that other potential planets in that area might be more hospitable to breathing creatures.
Of course, when we say "close," we mean 4.5 light-years, or 23.5 trillion miles away.
About 800 planets have been confirmed to exist outside our solar system, in addition to nearly 2,000 planet candidates found with the Kepler space mission.
Just a few years ago, astronomers operating the Kepler Telescope announced the discovery of the first two Earth-like worlds orbiting close to their parent star. That news drowned out another, revealing the existence of two additional Earth-like exoplanets around a dying star.
What is interesting about these findings is that the first two exoplanets were orbiting a brown subdwarf, a star that died a long time ago, whereas the two that were discovered more recently are orbiting a star that is currently in its death throes.
The first pair of worlds Kepler found orbits the star KOI 55, and are called KOI 55.01 and KOI 55.02. They spin around their parent star in 6.1 and 19.6 days, respectively, and experts estimate they are the stripped-down cores of former gas giants.
When their parent star passed from its main sequence to its red giant phase, its radius increased so much that it engulfed the two worlds, taking away all their gas, and leaving only their solid cores exposed. The planets should have been destroyed, but somehow they endured. Could the people living on these planets escaped before the planets died?
As I told my readers before, myths told by West Africans tell of the human race coming from the Sirius Star system. They knew more about that triple star system for centuries before western astronomers. Sirius is the brightest star in the night sky. With a visual apparent magnitude of −1.46, it is almost twice as bright as Canopus, the next brightest star. The name "Sirius" is derived from the Ancient Greek: Σείριος Seirios ("glowing" or "scorcher"). The star has the Bayer designation Alpha Canis Majoris (α CMa). What the naked eye perceives as a single star is actually a binary star system, consisting of a white main-sequence star of spectral type A1V, termed Sirius A, and a faint white dwarf companion of spectral type DA2, called Sirius B. The distance separating Sirius A from its companion varies between 8.1 and 31.5 AU.
Sirius A is about twice as massive as the Sun and has an absolute visual magnitude of 1.42. It is 25 times more luminous than the Sun but has a significantly lower luminosity than other bright stars such as Canopus or Rigel. The system is between 200 and 300 million years old. It was originally composed of two bright bluish stars. The more massive of these, Sirius B, consumed its resources and became a red giant before shedding its outer layers and collapsing into its current state as a white dwarf around 120 million years ago. A third star, Sirius C was found recently giving the West Africans a one up on modern western scientist. Plus the Africans have a model of the star system that is hundreds of years old to prove that they knew that Sirius is a triple star system, not a double star system like westerners believed.
Earth-like planet found in distant sun's habitable zone
"On December 5, 2011, Bill Borucki had the privilege of announcing the discovery of Kepler's first planet in the habitable zone of a sun-like star, Kepler-22b," Bill Borucki, the Kepler principal investigator at NASA's Ames Research Center, told reporters.
"It's 2.4 times the size of the Earth, it's in an orbital period (or year) of 290 days, a little bit shorter than the Earth's, it's a little bit closer to its star than Earth is to the sun, 15 percent closer.
"But the star is a little bit dimmer; it's a little bit lower in temperature, a little bit smaller. That means that planet, Kepler-22b, has a rather similar temperature to that of the Earth...If the greenhouse warming were similar on this planet, its surface temperature would be something like 72 Fahrenheit, a very pleasant temperature here on Earth."
It is not yet known whether Kepler-22b is predominantly rocky, liquid, or gaseous in composition, but the finding confirms for the first time the long-held expectation that Earth-size planets do, in fact, orbit other suns in the habitable zones of their host stars.
"I think there are two things that are really exciting about Kepler-22b," said Natalie Batalha, the deputy science team lead at Ames. "One is that it's right in the middle of this habitable zone.
"The second thing that's really exciting is it's orbiting a star very, very similar to our own sun. This is a solar analogue, almost a solar twin, very similar to our own sun and you've got a planet 2.4 times the size of the Earth right smack in the habitable zone."
That, in turn, greatly improves the odds for the existence of life, as it is commonly defined, beyond Earth's solar system.
Finding planets in the number that we are finding today around stars is the reason why the Catholic Church has changed its position on the belief in aliens. If one day, the proof of aliens on Earth can no longer be denied, they want their one billion followers to be ready to except them. The church said that they are ready to baptize them. But what if they have their own faith and how about it they want us to convert to their religion?
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