A new study dampens the enthusiasm of the searchers for extraterrestrial life a little
Avi Blizovsky
Pictured: The Orion Nebula, as photographed by the Hubble Space Telescope
Almost all protoplanets, i.e. planets in their early stages of life, will die before they can develop into the mature version of a planet from the dust disk in the planetary hothouses surrounding the parent star. scientists said this week.
Scientists who observed the regions where planets are formed near the Orion Nebula found instead a garbage cauldron of the remnants of the disk, like the primordial material that surrounded the Sun and from which the planets were born. The nebula's environment has produced thousands of sun-like stars in the past ten million years. Along with them, several giant stars were formed that eliminated, through their radiation, any possibility of the formation of planets in neighboring star systems.
The few stars that managed to escape the deadly rays were in most cases pushed into extreme orbits around one or more stars, becoming a double and triple star system, which hinders the formation of planets.
"There is a misconception that most stars have planets, and that they are actually solar systems scattered all over the universe." says astronomer John Bally from the University of Colorado in Boulder. "The reality as far as we know now is that Earth's solar system is special and we are lucky to be here."
The fact that solar systems are relatively rare and are not at a reasonable distance from each other means that even if a civilization developed around one of them, it would be very difficult for it to make contact with distant civilizations, and it would certainly be difficult for it to fly large average distances.
