Watching football highlights without seeing the result in the video title or thumbnail will be an issue during the World Cup. โถ๏ธ
I've built a website to try and solve this issue. It isn't perfect yet and just a fun project! Any feedback appreciated. โฝ๏ธ
https://t.co/HFlyQB6A8A
Every dot in that image is a star. Each one probably has planets. Scientists just combed through every planet weโve ever confirmed outside our solar system, all 6,150 of them, and asked a simple question: how many could actually support life?
45.
And thatโs the generous count. A stricter version drops it to 24.
I spent a while sitting with that number because it sounds depressing until you realize how misleading it is. Our telescopes are basically designed to find the wrong planets. Theyโre really good at spotting massive gas balls hugging their stars, the kind of planets where nothing could ever live. Small, rocky worlds sitting at the right distance from their star (not too hot, not too cold, liquid water could exist on the surface) are almost invisible to current instruments. Weโre finding them by accident more than by design.
So 45 is where the count starts, with instruments that can barely see what theyโre looking for. NASA estimates the Milky Way alone has somewhere between 100 billion and 300 billion planets. Weโve cataloged 6,150. Thatโs like surveying one apartment in Manhattan and concluding the city has no good restaurants.
The red glow in the photo is probably the North America Nebula, about 2,600 light-years from us. That bright clump is called the Cygnus Wall, a 20-light-year-long wall of hydrogen gas where new stars are being born right now. Planets are probably forming around them as you read this.
A Cornell team published the 45-planet list on March 19. Two of those worlds are close enough for the James Webb Space Telescope to actually sniff their atmospheres: TRAPPIST-1e, roughly 40 light-years away, and TOI-715b. JWST has already stared at TRAPPIST-1e four separate times, looking for gases that shouldnโt exist together unless something alive is producing them (methane plus carbon dioxide is the combo, same thing cows and forests pump into our own atmosphere). Results so far are a mess. The star itself keeps throwing off flares that scramble the data. Theyโre trying again with a clever workaround, watching a dead, airless planet in the same system pass in front of the star at the same time, to subtract out the starโs noise.
The closest rocky planet in a livable zone is Proxima Centauri b, 4.2 light-years away. At the speed of the fastest thing weโve ever launched, it would take about 73,000 years to get there.
I keep coming back to the math on this one. Two trillion galaxies in the observable universe. Hundreds of billions of planets per galaxy. And weโve checked 6,150. Weโre arguing about whether life exists out there based on a sample size that rounds to zero.
Suicidal thoughts and depression can quietly infiltrate your life.
This ongoing struggle can gradually gain control, but it doesnโt have to.
When you donโt have the strength to take another step, ask those you love to pull you. Youโre never alone in this ๐งก