Where in the Milky
Way are we most likely to encounter advanced technological civilizations? Virginia
Trimble, of the University of California, Irvine and one of the world's leading
astronomers specializing in the structure and evolution of stars and galaxies,
believes that it is highly probable that most of the stars that are both rich
enough in metals to harbor habitable terrestrial planets (such as Earth) and are more
than five billion years old exist considerably closer to the center of the
Milky Way than we are. It's as if the Milky Way had formed from the inside out,
with the older disk stars forming in the dense galactic center about 12 billion
years ago. The upshot is that a 6 billion year old terrestrial planet has a potential 1.5 billion-year technology headstart to produce some pretty awesome next-generation iPods.
Stars in spiral
galaxies such as the Milky Way have been divided by the world's experts in
galactic structure into four general categories.
The huge, outer halo
is thinly populated with some 500 million stars all more than twice the age of
our Sun with less than 10% solar metal content. It's here, in the outer halo
that terrestrial planets may never have formed but if they did, could be ten
billion years in advance of homo sapiens of Planet Earth.
Somewhat more metal
rich than the outer halo, the inner halo and thick disk populations of stars present
a more crowded, younger star-scape, making up about 10% of the Milky Way's
total star population. Like the outer halo, though, there is about a 10
billion-year jumpstart on Earth but, again, perhaps with few or no terrestrial
planets as hosts for Spore-like evolutionary events in the heavy-element deficient
halo and thick-disk stars.
The rest of the
galaxy's stars belong to the thin disk –home to the Sun- and Milky Way's
central bulge, a region that up until recently with the launch of the Spitzer infrared and Chandra x-ray space observatories has been difficult to study because of
the dense interstellar dust surrounding the massive Sagittarius A black hole. The Milk Way's center is small too -a 600 light years across while the galaxy itself is 100,000 light years across.
The thin disk and central
bulge stars are the best bet to find habitable terrestrial planets –an Earth's
twin with the added bonus of a possibly vastly advanced technological
civilization based solely on the potential amount of time they've had to think
about things like warp drive systems and time travel. The average metallicity
of thin disk solar objects is about two-thirds of solar. It is likely that most
bulge stars are significantly older than the sun and the average K giant and has
twice the solar iron abundance. Main sequence stars like the Sun are too faint
to be studied directly in the central bugle but are not expected to be chemically
different from the giants.
Milan Cirkovic of the Astronomical Observatory in Belgrade, points out that the median age of terrestrial planets in the Milky Way is about 1.8 gigayears (one billion years) greater than the age of the Earth and the Solar System, which means that the median age of technological civilizations should be greater than the age of human civilization by the same amount.
Posted by Casey
Kazan.
Recommended Post:
Could a 1.8 Gigayear Technology Gap Exist?
Source: Virgina
Trimble, Galactic Chemical evolution: Implications for the Existence of Habitable
Planets, pp. 184-191, Extraterrestrials, Cambridge University Press.
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