Garik Israelian Quotes

Estimates are that at least 70 per cent of all stars are accompanied by planets, and since the latter can occur in systems rather than as individuals (think of our own solar system), the number of planets in the Milky Way galaxy is of order one trillion.

It now appears that essentially every star has a planetary system. In the very beginning, we thought at best half.

The universe has told us the most common types of planets are small planets, and our study shows these are exactly the ones that are most likely to be orbiting Alpha Centauri A and B.

Super-Earths are how we call a family of planets... up to two times larger and about ten times more massive than the Earth.

55 Cancri is extraordinarily rich in heavy elements and extraordinarily efficient at making planets - much more so than our sun - and those elements are the very ones you need to make planets that aren't just gas giants.

When I grew up as a kid, we didn't know there were any other planets outside of our own solar system. It was widely speculated that planet formation was an incredibly rare event and that it's possible that other planets just don't exist in our galaxy, and it's just this special situation where we happen to have planets around our sun.

It now seems logical that all the stars, like our own sun, must have formed with a system of planets around them.

It's quite likely that planets and solar systems like ours could be forming in other galaxies in great numbers.

We now know that stars which are abundant in heavy metals are five times more likely to harbor orbiting planets than are stars deficient in metals.

A 'serious' scientist in 1992 or 1993 had to admit the possibility that planets were really rare, that most stars might not have planets. We've gone from there to here - where most stars have planets.

As our sensitivity improves, we are finally seeing planets with longer orbital periods, planetary systems that look more like our solar system.

Diminutive worlds are more likely to be rocky, and lapped by oceans and atmospheres. In the vernacular of 'Star Trek,' these would be M-class planets: life-friendly oases where biology could begin and bumpy-faced Klingons might exist.

This plucky NASA telescope is able to find planets en masse. If you compare planet hunting to prospecting for gold, then Kepler is equivalent to trading in your trusty pan for a diesel-powered sluice box.

I do definitely believe that there is life away from this planet. I mean, we've kind of established that with the fact that we found bacteria on meteorites, and we've kind of used that to backtrack and show how this Earth, this planet, could have formed the ability to sustain life in the first place.

We are the laws of chemistry and physics as they have played out here on Earth, and we are now learning that planets are as common as stars. Most stars, as it turns out now, will have planets.

The bottom line is, like, one in five stars has at least one planet where life might spring up. That's a fantastically large percentage. That means in our galaxy, there's on the order of tens of billions of Earth-like worlds.

Naturally, we think that finding another Earth-like planet is identifying a site that's at least friendly here for the evolution of life. The primary goal of the Kepler mission is to statistically assess the occurrence of these small terrestrial worlds.

Prebiotic chemistry on other worlds is going to be common. Plenty of small rocky planets will have similar chemistry. It's almost a given.

One of the first thoughts I had, when doing early exoplanet research, was that Earth and its many companions seemed very different from the planetary systems we were detecting.

Because Alpha Centauri is so close, it is our first stop outside our solar system. There's almost certain to be small, rocky planets around Alpha Centauri A and B.

Once we get beyond Mars, which formed from the same stuff as Earth, the likelihood that life is similar to what we find on this planet is very low.

Whether a star has planetary companions or not is a condition of its birth. Those with a larger initial allotment of metals have an advantage over those without.

Kepler's blown the lid off everything we know about extra-solar planets.

Generally speaking, exoplanets can be any size, and they are found in a wide range of orbits. Some have massive gas atmospheres; others are smaller with an icy or rocky composition.

There are millions of stars out there. It is difficult to think that life does not exist in any one of them.