UK-led telescope to gaze at exoplanets, plus Jupiter 's 'glow-in-the-dark' moon

Until 20 November, space fans will have a chance to pick up their own bit of photographic history courtesy of auctioneer Christie's Voyage To Another World: The Victor Martin-Malburet Photograph Collection. The 700 lots, comprising 2,400 original photographs collected over 15 years by Martin-Malburet, go back to the early days …

[Chris G]

I sincerely hope the Ariel team get all the funding they need and continuity up to the end of the mission.

It must be hard to wait around to see what a review result is going to be .

[redpawn]

Years ago...

I made prints from NASA negatives of the moon borrowed from the University of Hawaii NASA library. They might still exist in my mothers house. Needless to say, having a NASA library at my university and an L5 club there was great.

[John Smith 19]

Once no one knew exoplanets existed. Now we know of a 1000

Any chance of putting some numbers on the Drake Equation yet?

Exciting times. A British observatory in space, Rocket Lab to attempt their first booster recovery (with maybe a mid air recovery after that before the new year?)

[TVU]

"Any chance of putting some numbers on the Drake Equation yet?"

Back in 2018, PhD astrophysicist Ethan Siegel did a review of the Drake Equation taking account of the many exoplanets that had then been discovered by the Kepler space telescope. His revised computation was that there were 10 million planets in the Milky Way where life exists (albeit mostly microbial/otherwise relatively simple) and that 10,000 planets within the Milky Way Galaxy were teeming with diverse, multicellular, highly differentiated forms of life.

He then went on to propose that only 10% of that of those 10,000 worlds, 1,000 planets, hosted a technologically advanced civilisation. Personally, and given the sheer number of exoplanets that have been discovered since 2018 (total today = 4,300), I suspect that Ethan Siegel has possibly underestimated the numbers of life-bearing and civilisation-bearing planets by an order of magnitude.

Nevertheless, given the volume of the galaxy which might be 30 trillion+ cubic light years, the distances between life bearing worlds and civilisations will still be enormous.

[JCitizen]

Fantastic!!

I find the story about the moon glow the most interesting thing I've heard in quite a while - Thanks El Reg!!