A composite image of the galaxy cluster Abell 3627 shows X-rays from Chandra in blue, optical emission in yellow and emission from hydrogen light -- known to astronomers as 'H-alpha' -- in red. The optical and H-alpha data were obtained with the Southern Astrophysical Research (SOAR) Telescope in Chile. Galaxy clusters are collections of hundreds or even thousands of galaxies held together by gravity that are enveloped in hot gas. Image and Text Credits: X-ray: NASA/CXC/UVa/M. Sun et al; H-alpha/Optical: SOAR/MSU/NOAO/UNC/CNPq-Brazil/M.Sun et al.Astronomer and President of the Royal Society (academy of science) Martin Rees said science had made enormous progress in the search for planets grouped around other distant stars - a discipline he stressed did not exist in the 1990s.
"Now we know that most of the stars, like the sun, are likely to have planetary systems around them and we have every reason to suspect that many of them have planets that are rather like our earth," Rees told Reuters in an interview.
He said great strides in space search techniques over the last decade had removed one of the big obstacles in finding other worlds, and possibly even complex life forms, in our Milky Way galaxy of 100 million stars.
Are we alone? We may soon find out
