Is There Another Earth? (serious)

[zaza]

visualAd always lets me down.

mendhak, however, is correct. If you pick a random few arcseconds of sky , get a big telescope and see what you can see, you'll be able to count the number and types of star and galaxy visible in that region.
Repeat a lot of times. Get an average. There's a crude estimate.

Of course, it gets more complicated than this as there is some underlying distribution...there are not the same number of galaxies in any given direction, although broadly there are a lot of similarities..

Look up the Hubble Deep Field survey and the Hubble Ultra Deep Field survey.
Given the the Deep Field survey covers, to quote the page, the area of sky obscured by a tennis ball at 100m, how can you look at that image and not be completely astounded. It's not fake, it's not a conspiracy theory. It's an actual image of what's going on out there in the big wide Universe. Amazing!
Incidentally, the count of the Deep Field image is >1500 galaxies in approximately 1 in 28 millionths of the sky. Which leads to a rough estimate of 42 billion galaxies. And that's within the visible sphere afforded by Hubble. There is plenty of Universe further away than Hubble can see.

[si_the_geek]

Oh no, I've been adam-rolled!

[mendhak]

Save me from the evil man

[Code Doc]

Zaza said, "Incidentally, the count of the Deep Field image is >1500 galaxies in approximately 1 in 28 millionths of the sky. Which leads to a rough estimate of 42 billion galaxies. And that's within the visible sphere afforded by Hubble. There is plenty of Universe further away than Hubble can see."
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That means we need to start naming these galaxies for the archives. If there are at least 42 billion of them, it will be interesting to see how that is done to obtain unique names that we can all pronounce.

It may take a ruling by the government and a grant from the Gates foundation to get it started. Now, if one of these galaxies is found to contain a planet that resembles ours, should we call it Earth II or perhaps Earth Angel?

However, I am not sure how we are ever going to ascertain the existence of this other earth.

[Lord Orwell]

Zaza said, "Incidentally, the count of the Deep Field image is >1500 galaxies in approximately 1 in 28 millionths of the sky. Which leads to a rough estimate of 42 billion galaxies. And that's within the visible sphere afforded by Hubble. There is plenty of Universe further away than Hubble can see."
--------------------
That means we need to start naming these galaxies for the archives. If there are at least 42 billion of them, it will be interesting to see how that is done to obtain unique names that we can all pronounce.

It may take a ruling by the government and a grant from the Gates foundation to get it started. Now, if one of these galaxies is found to contain a planet that resembles ours, should we call it Earth II or perhaps Earth Angel?

However, I am not sure how we are ever going to ascertain the existence of this other earth.

i see no reason to name them all. The stars themselves 99% of the time just have greek-alphabet designations based on their relative brightness in the constellation they exist in. Stars that are not normally visible to the naked eye don't even have this.

[Code Doc]

i see no reason to name them all. The stars themselves 99% of the time just have greek-alphabet designations based on their relative brightness in the constellation they exist in. Stars that are not normally visible to the naked eye don't even have this.

Well, I suppose we could use a 20-digit number to preserve uniqueness or a system of letter and number combinations, similar to passwords and serial numbers.

Being able to pronounce the name is perhaps irrelevant. We can simply reserve those for objects judged visible to the naked eye. If we make no attempt to name the heavenly bodies, how does person A discuss obect X with person B?

[Lord Orwell]

Well, I suppose we could use a 20-digit number to preserve uniqueness or a system of letter and number combinations, similar to passwords and serial numbers.

Being able to pronounce the name is perhaps irrelevant. We can simply reserve those for objects judged visible to the naked eye. If we make no attempt to name the heavenly bodies, how does person A discuss obect X with person B?

pretty much the way we do now. The first thing you do is narrow it down by constellation. A star chart will show you that the entire sky is divided into constellations with nothing left over. As an interesting side-note, it will also tell you that the dates we are actually in a certain constellation has very little correlation with horoscope dates, due to the fact they are all different sizes.

After that, it's a matter of degrees of movement from the known object.

But... Do you remember the "star registry"? I have no idea if it was a legitimate organization or not, but you could "name a star after someone" to show you care. For a reasonable price, of course.