Structure of the Milky Way?

Dark Universe

I and a few friends thought about the oort cloud...
If it has 2 light years in lenght, thats half way to Alpha Centauri...
What would stop our near neighbor Alpha Centauri to have its own oort cloud...
And if this is wright couldn't the galaxy be filled with dwarf planets, asteroids and comets rather than empty space between the stars as usual sci-fi movies like to show?

Dead Boss

Yes the galaxy is filled with asteroids, comets and dwarf planets, but that doesn't mean that you would bump into one celestial body after another when passing through it. The distances between these objects are so enormous that you would have to carefully aim in order to hit something. The sci-fi movies actually got it right. The space is mostly empty.

Dark Universe

Could we actually Colonize some of those wild planets... if they are big enaugh?
i mean i think they can get to the size of earth or biogger, no?

AnTiFreeze3

^ Spell check.

It's not very easy to answer speculative questions. The Kepler satellite is searching for Earth-sized planets, so if we were to ever colonize a planet, it would more than likely be a planet similarly sized to earth (obviously).

Chalnoth

Do you mean a rogue planet? As in a planet-sized object not anywhere near a star? They'd be far, far too cold to colonize.

Dark Universe

Oke...
Cold let it be, we could have hitting systems inside huge metropolises covered by some kind a dome but not made of glass as it is too fragile...
or we could make a strong enaugh glass so we could also se the galaxy trough it...
eeeeeh... this kind a colonization is more for fun... imagine this small scene: in the darkness of space in a huge cluster of planets, Dwarf and partially borken planets, dwarf planets, comets and asteroids surrounded by a shinning blue nebula but thin enaugh to se the galaxy trough the glass domes of our colonies... wouldn't that be nice even spectacular if i say so...
man this chat is more because i'm REAAAAAAALLY bored

Drakkith

Did you have a specific question?

Chalnoth

It's more a problem of having the energy to actually do anything.

Maybe if we solve the problem of getting nuclear fusion reactors off the ground, maybe it will be possible. But why bother with that when there are likely to be billions of candidate planets in our galaxy within the habitable zones of stars?

AnTiFreeze3

True, but the majority of those candidates are planets found in the solar system of a red dwarf, which means that the habitable zone of these planets is required to be a lot closer than the earth is to our sun, which opens up complications like harmful radiation.

Then again, once we get to the point where we can colonize other planets, I doubt we would want to be too picky :)

Chalnoth

Well, that's more a feature of the fact that it is technically more difficult to detect planets which have orbits closer to one year here on Earth than it is to detect these closer-in planets. I doubt that there is any real bias towards red dwarfs where habitable-zone planets are concerned.

Of course, most stars out there are red dwarfs, but there are one heck of a lot of yellow dwarfs around as well.

Dark Universe

For posterity man!
To show the galaxy how kool can we get

I agree with you, Chalnoth,
But couldn't we colonize a few planets that orbit around Blue giant stars???
If there are any solid ones... or...

Chalnoth

Well, blue giants tend to have rather short lifetimes, and when they die they explode in massive supernovas. So they would be rather hazardous places to live.

Yellow dwarfs, like our own sun, are pretty much ideal. Much smaller, and they are quite volatile when young and the habitable zone is in very close to the star, making it unlikely that they have genuinely habitable planets. Much larger, and the lifetime of the star shortens significantly, often with many rather violent episodes before the final supernova. Yellow dwarf stars, though, last quite a long time (billions of years) and are relatively quiescent.

Dark Universe

Posterity, remember let's harvest some adrenaline...
Till the time comes when we could even control a supernova or just live trough the exploding giant we are most surely going to search for planets orbiting yellow dwarf and red dwarf stars...

But hey... a small imaginary jump in the future jus may feed our will to explore space and get us a bit a fun!

(In the future we would have colonized planets that have close orbits to black holes...)

Dark Universe

one thing that i don't understand... Why are there more red dwarfs than any other type of stars?

SHISHKABOB

because they spend a very long time as red dwarfs, whereas giant stars don't last very long

Drakkith

That plus red dwarfs are very easily made as they require much less material than larger more massive stars. When stars form from a collapsing gas cloud you typically have many more small stars created than larger stars.

AnTiFreeze3

I don't understand your reasoning at all. Isn't the idea of colonizing other planets far-fetched enough for now? Let alone colonizing unfavorable and unforgiving planets near black holes?

It's good to be excited about these things, but you need to stay slightly realistic. If the only reason to inhabit certain areas of the universe is just for the hell of it, or just to show that we can, then I think we would need to question the intelligence of the people authorizing those missions.