Billions and billions of Earth-sized planets call Milky Way home
Using Kepler data, astronomers estimate that a sizeable fraction of sunlike stars have possibly habitable planets
By Andrew Grant, 19:00 PM November 1, 2013
The galaxy contains billions of potentially habitable Earth-sized planets, according to even the most conservative estimate drawing on data from NASA’s Kepler space telescope.
Although a mechanical failure recently put the telescope out of commission (SN: 6/15/13, p. 10), Kepler’s census of planets orbiting roughly 170,000 stars is enabling astronomers to predict how common planets similar to Earth are across the galaxy.
The authors of a study published November 4 in the Proceedings of the Nati...
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