Scientists Estimate 40% of Red Dwarfs Have A Rocky Planet 114
An anonymous reader writes with an excerpt from Science World Report: "Astronomers hunting for rocky planets with the right temperature to support life estimate there may be tens of billions of them in our galaxy alone. A European team said on Wednesday that about 40 percent of red dwarf stars — the most common type in the Milky Way — have a so-called 'super-Earth' planet orbiting in a habitable zone that would allow water to flow on the surface."
Re:Drake equation (Score:4, Interesting)
The Drake equation could be updated, but I think it has too many factors which have very high error margins. This just means that we would not be much smarter with the updated equation.
Hunt for the spectra [centauri-dreams.org] of the atmospheres of exoplanets! That should give us some idea [mit.edu] if life exists there or not.
Re:I wonder... (Score:4, Interesting)
What you asked, yes wormholes are entirely based in science and the current mathematical models that we have for the universe generally state that they must be possible (in some cases, must exist). Not all, but many.
What you meant, is there any *truth* to wormholes; meaning were the sci-fi novels correct: No, not really. Unless you can move the ends of a wormhole there isn't much use to them; and the math is much less supportive of that.
However, generally speaking on average our current physics models say yes they are possible and yes they *may* be possible to create. However they say so in sort of the same way that they say travelling faster than light is possible (in that they don't expressly forbid it, but generally require infinite energy to actually get there).
Some other physics grads/docs will come and call me out for inaccuracies, but please understand I'm intentionally over-simplifying.