The Drake Equation #5
by Monica Schroeder
Title
The Drake Equation #5
Artist
Monica Schroeder
Medium
Digital Art
Description
The center of the Milky Way is a crowded neighborhood and not always a calm one, as seen in this image from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. In The Drake Equation is used to calculate the possible number of extraterrestrial civilizations in the Milky Way Galaxy.
N = R* fp ne fl fi fc L
N = number of civilizations with which humans could communicate.
R* = mean rate of star formation.
fP = fraction of stars that have planets.
ne = mean number of planets that could support life per star with planets.
fl = fraction of life-supporting planets that develop life.
fi = fraction of planets with life where life develops intelligence.
fc = fraction of intelligent civilizations that develop communication.
L = mean length of time that civilizations can communicate. to the supermassive black hole at the center, the area is filled with all sorts of different inhabitants that affect and influence one another. The image shows three massive star clusters: the Arches (upper right), Quintuplet (upper center), and the GC star cluster (bottom center), which is near the enormous black hole known as Sagittarius A. The massive stars in these clusters can themselves be very bright, point-like X-ray sources, when winds blowing off their surfaces collide with winds from an orbiting companion star. The stars in these clusters also release vast amounts of energy when they reach the ends of their lives and explode as supernovas, which, in turn, heat the material between the stars. The stars near the Galactic Center also can emit X-rays as stellar corpses - either in the form of neutron stars or black holes in binary systems - and are also seen as point-like sources in the Chandra image.
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October 5th, 2022
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