Twinkle Twinkle Little Star

On Friday night there was mass panic and confusion as the skies above Britain lit up like the Blackpool Illuminations when a... no, wait... I mean, there was some concern over a possible... no, that's not it. Here we go...a few people mentioned on Twitter that they had seen a meteor or something in the sky.

The debate continues as to whether it was a meteor or space junk falling to earth but whichever explanation turns out to be true I'm just happy it occurred.

Firstly, I loved reading comments along the lines of "I don't know what it is but it's definitely not a UFO" by those who would do well to look up the word 'unidentified' in a dictionary.

Secondly, I found the "It was like Independence Day" quote from the BBC report at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-19683687 highly amusing. Well done to the reporter in finding someone to liken the sight to a film they have clearly never seen. See if you can spot the difference in the two pictures below.

Finally, and most importantly, it inspired me to go out into the garden at stupid o'clock in the morning and take a long, hard, gaze at the sky. It was, fortunately, fairly clear and despite all the nearby light pollution the view was still fairly awe inspiring. Once again I found myself wondering if there is life out there. To be honest, I think that there probably is.

Perhaps I should make clear that by 'life' I'm talking about any form of life - single-celled micro-organisms, vegetation, Dalek - anything. No, I don't believe that little green men are visiting us, abducting people and doing eye-watering things with probes, but I do think that the numbers alone suggest that the chances are Earth is not the only life-hosting planet in the universe.

 

The astonishing image above was created by Nick Risinger as shown on the recent Horizon episode "How Big Is The Universe". An interactive version can be found at : http://media.skysurvey.org/interactive360/index.html …

The universe is quite big after all. We can't even see it all because we can only see as far as the light from the birth of our universe has reached - what's known as the visible universe. How can we rule out the possibility of life existing on planets orbiting stars which we don't even know about yet?

A quick check around the net and it would appear that currently the best guess for the number of stars in the observable universe is around 3 septillion which is 3 followed by 24 zeroes (US format), and some consider that a conservative guess. That's quite a bit more than there are grains of sand on the Earth and those are just the stars.

Between 10-20% of these stars may have one or more planets orbiting them which in turn may have one or more moons. So even if just a tiny fraction of a single percent of these are likely candidates to support life that's still an awful lot of possibilities.

And if that doesn't leave your head spinning I just want to leave you with a quote from Douglas Adams - "Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space."

Ade