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RFK Jr. is not a serious person. Don't take him seriously.1 month ago in Genomics, Medicine, and Pseudoscience
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The Site is Dead, Long Live the Site2 years ago in Catalogue of Organisms
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The Site is Dead, Long Live the Site2 years ago in Variety of Life
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What I read 20194 years ago in Angry by Choice
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Histological Evidence of Trauma in Dicynodont Tusks5 years ago in Chinleana
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Posted: July 21, 2018 at 03:03PM6 years ago in Field Notes
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Why doesn't all the GTA get taken up?6 years ago in RRResearch
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Harnessing innate immunity to cure HIV8 years ago in Rule of 6ix
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post doc job opportunity on ribosome biochemistry!9 years ago in Protein Evolution and Other Musings
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Re-Blog: June Was 6th Warmest Globally10 years ago in The View from a Microbiologist
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The Lure of the Obscure? Guest Post by Frank Stahl12 years ago in Sex, Genes & Evolution
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Lab Rat Moving House13 years ago in Life of a Lab Rat
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Goodbye FoS, thanks for all the laughs13 years ago in Disease Prone
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Slideshow of NASA's Stardust-NExT Mission Comet Tempel 1 Flyby13 years ago in The Large Picture Blog
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in The Biology Files
A plant pundit comments on plants, the foibles and fun of academic life, and other things of interest.
This Neighborhood Is Getting Crowded
In 1988 exactly one (1) extrasolar planet was thought to exist, and that was confirmed in 1992. So that's a total of 10 planets, nine (before Pluto got demoted) orbiting an undistinguished, medium-sized yellow star, which the carbon-based, primate-descended inhabitants of the third planet call Sol, and one planet orbiting another star. Now there are 837 known extra-solar planets (as of 15 September 2012) in 660 planetary systems. Based on what is now known, each star in the Milky Way galaxy (by the way, galaxia mean milky), which has a 100 billion stars, give or take, is now estimated to have an average of 1.6 planets, or a galaxy with 160 billion planets. Something like 2400 possible planets await confirmation (presumably very detailed measurements). Doc Madhattan posts a nice video of how planets form and most interesting is the significance of the ice line. So doesn't it seem like the galactic neighborhood is getting a bit crowded? After all it was just about 500 years ago when we thought Earth was the center of the universe. 20 years ago we knew about one additional planet, and now we probably know about 2400 planets. The nearest known planet orbiting Epsilon Eridani is only 10.5
light-years away (approx. 63 trillion miles)! TPP will be closing his window shades at night.
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