Somewhat recent BBC article that new telescopes have discovered 3 times as many stars than previously thought. More stars, more planets.....
"It found that galaxies older than ours contain 20 times more red dwarf stars than more recent ones.
Red dwarfs are smaller and dimmer than our own Sun; it is only recently that telescopes have been powerful enough to detect them.
According to Yale's Professor Pieter van Dokkum, who led the research, the discovery also increases the estimate for the number of planets in the Universe and therefore greatly increases the likelihood of life existing elsewhere in the cosmos.
"There are possibly trillions of Earths orbiting these stars," he said. "Red dwarfs are typically more than 10 billion years old and so have been around long enough for complex life to evolve on planets around them. It's one reason why people are interested in this type of star."
Apart from the other interesting stuff in that article, I would like to ask....
If our sun is about 4.5 b years old and the stars they are talking about are about twice the age of our star, and 'complex life' has evolved over an extra ~5 b years, then surely we would have heard from them by now?
Wouldn't 5b years be enough time to figure out inter galactic travel? ( through what ever means....)
Sure, there are billions of galaxies and trillions upon trillions of stars out there, but if they have that 5b years on us they would have invented some sort of 'earth like- supporting life- planet radar'?
We are finding hundreds of exoplanets at the moment, and we are just a speck compared to the research "they" have been doing.....for five billion years.....
.....just wondering.....
Bartman
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11888362