Original Post on Universe Today
This is an absolutely fantastic photo, the earth and moon are being viewed from Mars at an angle 90 degrees to the earth from the Sun. You can quite clearly see the Pacific coast of South America and the bulk of North America above it. The detail in the clouds is pretty good too!
One of the biggest questions in astronomy today is, are there any other Earths out there, and if so, how many?
We know that there are over 100 billion stars in the galaxy, and that a lot of them have planets. But we’re still groping round trying to nail down the frequency of planets, and how many are rocky bodies like Earth (as opposed to gas giants like Saturn and Jupiter).
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A new study using the Spitzer Space Telescope has revealed that planets like Earth may be common! The procedure was actually rather simple. They looked at over 300 sun-like stars, and grouped them by ages (very young, young, middle aged, etc). They then used Spitzer to look for the presence of dust around the stars; dust glows in the infrared when warm, and the temperature (and thus the distance of the dust from the star) can be found.
Given the number of solar systems in our universe the probability of the existence of another earth like planet, has to be nearly 1. However until now this is just theory. This could be quite an exciting step forward to finding other sources of life in our universe.
Some fantastically clear photos which will make your holiday snaps look a little pathetic in comparison!
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