Extrasolar Planets With Life Forms Soon
Galaxies are enormous and hold hundreds of billions of stars. These stars form from cold, dense gas. Indeed, every large galaxy, including the Milky Way, is wrapped in a huge envelope of gas called the circumgalactic medium, or CGM. This gas is a reservoir of raw material and stretches 10-20 times the size of the visible portion of the galaxy. This circumgalactic medium gas eventually cools, moves inward into the galaxy, and clumps together to form stars. Thus, the CGM plays a key role in shaping stars, planets, and even life within a galaxy.
But astronomers have long puzzled over why, given how much star-forming gas surrounds them, galaxies don’t have even more stars. What is keeping the fuel from cooling down and forming those stars?
A study led by astronomers Sanchayeeta Borthakur of Arizona State University and Namrata Roy, now at the Raman Research Institute, found evidence that narrow jets of heated plasma, blasted out by the supermassive black holes at galaxies’ centers, can affect the whole galaxy even beyond what we can see, and may shape its future. The jets may reach out and disrupt the gas that galaxies need to keep growing. Their research has been published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
When a black hole actively feeds on gas, it can release enormous energy that heats the surrounding gas. Even though these black holes can be powerhouses of energy, they are very small, and are roughly about the size of our solar system. Yet their host galaxies can hold about 100 billion such solar systems.
In my introduction to Modern Kabbalah, “God, Sex and Kabbalah”, I devoted an entire chapter to Extra Terrestrial Intelligent Life and God. In 1983 when the book was published, there was no evidence that any other stars had planetary systems. Today, astronomers have discovered 5,300+ planets. It’s also an indication of just how common planets are – with most stars in the Milky Way hosting at least one world in orbit around them. The Extrasolar Planets Encyclopedia, run by the Observatoire de Paris, has already passed the 5,300 mark.
All this supports the assertion, based on Kabbalistic teachings, that God didn’t create a universe with millions of billions of stars and leave it devoid of intelligent, spiritually aware lifeforms, with only one exception. Earth size planets at the right distance to support carbon based life will be discovered in the next few years I believe. “We can say that most sunlike stars have planets, and most of them have low-mass planets,” says astronomer Francesco Pepe.
An accompanying study that will appear in an upcoming issue of Astronomy & Astrophysics presents the team’s long-awaited characterization of its planetary population – and suggests that more than 50 percent of sunlike stars sport a planet. The little guys among them – with masses between Earth’s and Neptune’s – occur primarily in planetary systems. This suggests that roughly 70 to 80 percent of low-mass planets might live in multi-planet neighborhoods, says astronomer Debra Fischer of Yale University. “This paper is a home-run hit.” The new collection suggests that lighter planets are more common in extrasolar systems than heavier Jupiter-like ones.
As instruments become more precise and planet-finding missions like Kepler continue to stare at stars, finding Earth-like planets in life-friendly orbits looms. “The floodgates are about to open,” Fischer says. “Between what Kepler is doing and these Doppler surveys, we’re really on the threshold of seeing a whole population of planets in this so-called habitable zone.”
I made two other predictions in “God, Sex and Kabbalah” 43 years ago. One was that while life would be wide spread, intelligent life would be rare. Almost all scientists believe this.
The other prediction I made was that any intelligent lifeforms that we may encounter would be peaceful because if their highly advanced technology was not offset by even more advanced and effective religions they would have destroyed themselves. Thus, each of the intelligent, spiritually aware, ethical lifeforms must successfully pass through a Messianic Age and emerge as a peaceful civilization. We should not be afraid if they contact us.
