Free Astronomy Magazine July-August 2020

45 JULY-AUGUST 2020 for other technological species?” It would be reasonable to expect a typical species to inhabit a galaxy that offers life more development op- portunities. As a result, either we are not typi- cal, or the results that Dayal and colleagues have reached are wrong. Recently, Daniel P. Whit- mire (University of Ar- kansas) conducted a study published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical So- ciety that substantially challenges the results of Dayal’s team. The main objection raised by Whitmire is that the previous work only con- siders the evolutionary stage of the galaxies of the local universe, ig- noring the fact that the time it takes for life to evolve into a techno- logical species is probably billions of years throughout the universe, periods during ities different from ours risks being a mere philosophical speculation. Nonetheless, a single datum is better than nothing and, ac- cording to the princi- ple of mediocrity, we must consider our technological species as typical, having no comparison that sug- gests the opposite. At this point a ques- tion arises: “If we consider our techno- logical species to be typical, but a large elliptical galaxy may contain up to 10,000 times more poten- tially habitable plan- ets than a spiral galaxy, why would we, and spiral galax- ies in general, not in- stead be considered outliers in the search M 87, in the constellation Virgo, is a giant el- liptical galaxy, one of the most mas- sive in the local universe. Its SMBH is proportionally massive (about seven billion solar masses) and is the engine of the pow- erful jet of plasma erupting from the active galactic nucleus. [ESO] Right, the Dragon Trio: NGC 5981, NGC 5982, and NGC 5985, contain- ing two barred spi- rals, one cutting view and the other almost in front, and an elliptical cross in the middle. [Stephen Leshin]