how do we know that there are not more suns and planets just like our solar system.Outer space is enormous?

Answer 1

WASHINGTON - The first "sniffs of air" of two huge far-away planets reveal that they seem to be missing water, a surprising finding amid weather unlike any planets in our solar system with blast furnace-like gusts amid supersonic winds.

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The absence of water from the atmosphere of both these Jupiter-sized gaseous bodies upsets one of the most basic assumptions of astronomy.

One of the researchers, Harvard University astronomy professor David Charbonneau, called the planets "very different beasts ... unlike any other planets in the solar system."

So far, scientists have found 213 planets outside our solar system — they are called exoplanets. But only eight or nine are in the right orbit and location for the type of study reported by three teams using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope.

The closest of the two planets studied, HD 189733b, is 360 trillion miles from Earth in the constellation Vulpecula. The other planet, HD 209458b, is about 900 trillion miles away in the constellation Pegasus and it has a strange cloud of fine silicate particles. Two different research teams studied it.

The two suns the planets orbit closely have hydrogen and oxygen, the stable building blocks of water. The planets' atmospheres — examined for the first time using light spectra to determine the air's chemical composition — are supposed to be made up of the same thing, good old H2O.

"We had expected this tremendous signature of water ... and it wasn't there," said Carl Grillmair of the California Institute of Technology and Spitzer Science Center. He and Charbonneau studied the closer of the two planets, and their work is being published online in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Our own solar system has two planets without water in the atmosphere, Grillmair noted: Mercury, which doesn't have an atmosphere, and Venus, which is a different type of planet from the huge gaseous ones that would be expected to have the components of water in the air.

But consider the atmosphere on the second of the two exoplanets, the one 900 trillion miles away: "Weather today on 209458 is hot, dry, probably cloudy with a chance of wind," study team leader Mark Swain of NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab said in a Wednesday teleconference.

How hot? Try 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit. How windy? Somewhere between 500 and 2,000 mph.

Another research team found indications that the atmosphere has grains of silicon-oxygen compounds. That team, led by L. Jeremy Richardson of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, is reporting its research in Thursday's issue of Nature.

But the key finding is dry.

"In NASA's search for life beyond Earth, the mantra has been to follow the water," said Carnegie Institution of Washington astronomer Alan Boss, who wasn't involved in any of the research.

Scientists say it's possible the water is hiding beneath dust clouds or that all the airborne water molecules are the same temperature, making it impossible to see using an infrared spectrograph. Or maybe it's just not there and astronomers have to go back to the drawing board when it comes to these alien planets.

"The very fact that we've been surprised here is a wake-up call. We obviously need to do some more work," Grillmair said.

Charbonneau said these surprising "sniffs of air from an alien world" tell astronomers not to be so Earth-centric in thinking about other planets. "We're limited by our imagination in thinking about the different avenues that these atmospheres take place in," he said.

Swain called the results "a very important stepping stone for our ultimate goal of characterizing planets around other stars where life could exist

Answer 2

We do know there are more suns similiar to our own. In this galaxy alone there are 200 billions stars. More than half of them are binary star systems with two suns orbiting each other. The rest of them are single star system, some the same size and age as our own suns. As for planets right now we can only detect large planets like Jupiter and we have found over two hundred solar systems with these types of planets. Nasa and other space agencies are in the process of deploying new satellites that can detect smaller worlds about twice the size of Earth. Some day we may hope to find other worlds that are similiar size and construction as Earth. However, just consider that Mars is about the same size as Earth but it is so much different. As to whether there is life, that's another story. Space is ENORMOUS is an understatement. If you could visit one solar system every second, you would not live long enough to visit every solar system in this galaxy alone. If you visited one galaxy every second you would not live long enough to visit every galaxy in the "known" universe. 100 years is about 3 billion seconds. WOW!

Answer 3

The Big Bang is the most popular theory about the creation of the Universe. According to it, the whole Universe was created in a split second in one huge explosion. All matter was squeezed together into a tiny, super-hot, dense ball that was smaller than an atom.
Whose to say there isnt anything out there. As time goes by different things are discovered. We dont even know every inch of our oceans either. what mysteries still live below us. The oceans are another whole universe in itself. I would like to believe there ARE other planets out there and these too have human life or life in some way. Maybe as our techknowledgy grows into bigger and greater things we will one day discover the truth.

Answer 4

We do not know. We are just now developing better ways to detect planets around suns. Carl Sagan, a famous scientist who wrote the book the movie "Contact" was based on, speculated there were billions upon billions of inhabited planets.

Also, Jesus in the Bible says He has other sheep we do not know about. Possibly people on other planets.

Answer 5

We DO know that there are more suns and planets. Every star you can see in the sky is a sun, and we know for sure that some of them have planets. We just don't know for sure that they ALL have planets.

Answer 6

We have already found other solar systems with planets orbiting distant suns. There are billions more to be found.

Answer 7

Though we have no proof we do know that there are billions of solar systems like ours and many millions of technological societies like ours.
They may be widely spaced,and we may never hear from them but they are out there..

Answer 8

there probably are billions of planets out there
who said that ?
that there's only this solar system
there's more than this
so much more space to explore

Answer 9

We don't and more likely than not, there are.

Answer 10

We don't.