Milky Way's Core --New Research Points to a Life-Zone Hotspot

A new map suggests that around 1.2 percent of all stars may have been capable of supporting complex life at some point in the history of the galaxy.

The analysis of the first 136 days of results from NASA's Kepler telescope - launched to 'search for habitable planets' - has ignited furious debate over the possibilities of intelligent life in space.  Kepler's scans have found 1,235 extrasolar planets in the Cygnus constellation of our own galaxy, the Milky Way.

A new  study, a Model of Habitability Within the Milky Way Galaxy,led by the University of Hawaii's Michael Gowanlock, used computer models to 'find' habitable planets - and to weigh the possibly devastating effects of supernova explosions. The rapid formation of planets at the galaxy's core would 'outweigh' the negative effects of repeated supernova explosions - providing a haven for life, said the researchers.

Common wisdom has it that the galactic habitable zone is a torus about 30 lightyears in diameter around the center of the galaxy lessening the likelyhood that habitable planets will form close to the galactic centre or very far away from it. In contrast, however, Michael Gowanlock at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu and colleagues, developed a new map of the galactic habitable zone in which challenges this convention and suggests that the galactic habitable zone is much more complex than a simple torus.

The new map uses the latest findings about exoplanets to determine galactic habitability. The oldest stars in the early universe were formed entirely from hydrogen and helium but generated heavier elements when they ran out of fuel and exploded. The next generation of stars formed from the debris of these supernovas and so have higher levels of heavier elements or metallicity.
Astronomers have recently discovered that exoplanets are much more likely to form around  those stars that contain heavier elements.

These heavier stars are most likely to form in areas where there are lots of supernovas and in our galaxy that's near the centre (at distance of about 9 light years), and are more likely to have planets and therefore more likely to have a planet in the habitable zone

The Gowanlock team say that habitable planets are so common towards the center of the galaxy that even if many are wiped out by supernovas, there should still be plenty that survive for long enough for complex life to evolve.

"We find the majority of stars in our galaxy will be bathed in flux by a nearby supernova event during their lifetimes,' the team concluded - but even if a planet was irradiated, it could evolve life at a later stage, or even re-evolve life after a supernova blast.  Planets that might support avanced life could be more common than we realize."

Their model suggests that 2.7 per cent of stars in the inner galaxy should have habitable planets. And there should also be habitable planets further away too. Gowanlock and team say about 0.25 per cent of stars in the outer galaxy should have habitable planets.

"We predict that ∼1.2% of all stars host a planet that may have been capable of supporting complex life at some point in the history of the Galaxy," says Gowanlock. But, their model also predicts that 75 per cent of these habitable planets will be tidally locked around their mother star, meaning that one side of this planet would burn under a scorching sun while the other would freeze.

Whether life could exist anywhere on a planet such as the superEarth around Gliese 581, which is close enough to the star to be in the habitable zone but is also probably tidally locked, is unknown.

Currently, arguments rage over what, precisely, constitutes a 'habitable' planet. Early statistical analysis of the Kepler results provoked furious debate when one researcher concluded that one-third of planets round sun-like stars (stars with the classifcation F, G or K) could have 'earth-like' planets, while other experts say that many of the "habitable" worlds would be shrouded in clouds of freezing gas.

Source: The Daily Galaxy