Perhaps you believe that only Earth is enough for us and that there are no planets beyond Earth that are suitable for habitation. But the number of Earth-like planets is likely to be in the billions. Our Milky Way Galaxy may have as many as 6 billion Earth-like planets, according to new research.
Astronomers at the University of British Columbia (UBC) have come to a startling conclusion by examining data from NASA’s Kepler project. That is, from 2009 to 2018, the Kepler planet-hunting satellite collected data on 200,000 stars.
Scientists set criteria for selecting such a planet. The criteria included being the same size as Earth and having a rocky environment around it. Also, it would be nice to have a star like our Sun. Moreover, the planet must be a habitable zone with an ideal environment for the presence of water and life.
Recently 17 new planets (“exoplanets”) have been identified outside our solar system. Researcher Michel Kunimoto says there are about 5 planets for every Sun.
Kunimoto used a technique known as ‘forward modeling’ to conduct the study, which allowed him to overcome the problem that Earth-like planets are difficult to detect due to their small size and orbital distance from their star.
“I started counting the absolute number of exoplanets around the stars I searched for,” UBC’s press release explains the research. Each planet is marked as ‘detected’ or ‘missed’ depending on how likely the algorithm is to find the desired planet.
Then, the planets I detected were compared to the actual planet catalog. If the simulation found a close match, then the representation of the number of early planets was better than the actual number of planets orbiting the star.”