I remember reading of the early Viking explorers who settled Greenland, that inhospitable place, which is anything but green.
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The instructions to find the settlement around 900 (Current Era) CE were, “Sail by the Faeroes (Islands) seeing only half the mountain (distance out). Then continue due west till you come to the place of the whales. Turn to the North and there it is.”
Had they continued further north they would have come to the archipelago and island of Svalbard and Longyearbyen, the tiny city of 2000 people.
In a unique conjunction the islands of the Faereos and Svalbard were the only inhabited places on Earth to see the Total Eclipse on March 20.
In the bitter cold of Svalbard, a Czech tourist was attacked in his tent by a hungry polar bear, but survived after treatment.
A hard way to see an eclipse. But, the viewing of the three minutes of totality was superb, although it had been hoped that the eclipse viewers would see the Aurora Borealis during the eerie dark.
Sadly this was not to be, but the tourists took home memories of a superb eclipse, a brilliant corona and all in sparkling cold and clear skies at the top of the world.
The brilliant astrophysicists at the Niels Bohr Institute and the University of Copenhagen and our own Australian National University have been using the Kepler satellite observatory to observe alien solar systems.
Their conclusions are that in the thousands of Milky Way stars observed it seems there are an average of at least two planets in the habitable zone of many of these stars.
The habitable zone or Goldilocks zone, not too hot, not too cold, is the area around a star where liquid water can exist. This is our measure of the possibility of life as we know it.
The illustration shows a simplified diagram of the types of planetary systems. The green areas round each star is the habitable zone. Obviously the zone is further out for the hot stars and very close in for the cooler stars.
Does this mean that around the 250 billion stars in the Milky Way there will be 500 billion planets capable of supporting life?
Yes, if we accept the Titus-Bode Law, that old law that correctly placed the then as yet undiscovered planet Uranus in our solar system.
The law states that there is a certain ratio between the planets in a system.
So if you know the ratio of the orbital period of the first and second planets you then know the ratio between the second and third and so on.
The logic and skill of these intrepid researchers and their spectacular instruments hopefully will soon answer the question, are we alone?