How does this equation -- really more like a thought experiment -- come apart?

R_star -- this is the number of stars that form per year. We think we know how stars form (recall Lecture 16) ...

Freedman and Kaufmann

... and by studying star-forming regions ...

http://www.mpifr-bonn.mpg.de/staff/tpreibis/tauori.gif

... we get a pretty good understanding of what the star formation rate in the galaxy today is.

In fact, some people study not just today's star formation rate but the star formation rate over the history of the Universe.

As you can imagine, the Drake equation might be considered to have another variable -- time -- in it, so it's pretty useful to understand star formation over the past billions of years.

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