Complexity Digest 2003.35 - 14

01-Sep-2003

Water Worlds Make A Splash As The Best Hope For Alien Life, Nature Bookmark and Share

Excerpts: researchers think that real water worlds - Earth-sized planets predominantly covered by oceans - are more likely than land-covered planets to host life. Simple assumptions about the likely distribution of planets in the Milky Way suggest that many water worlds exist in our Galaxy, but elude existing methods of detection. "There could be as many as one billion stellar systems with potentially habitable zones," says Siegfried Franck, a geophysicist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (...) locate the 'habitable zone' of 47 UMa, a Sun-like star some 45 light years away.