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It is a galactic discovery.
According to NASA estimates, there may be 300 million planets in the Milky Way that support life.
The planets are all rocky, Earth-like in size and orbit in the “Goldilocks zone,” not too far and not too close to sun-like stars, NASA said in a news release. The new research also estimated the temperatures of those stars, giving scientists a better idea of whether they could have liquid water.
“We have always known how to define habitability simply in terms of the physical distance of a planet from a star, so that it wasn’t too hot or cold, it left us with a lot of speculation,” said Ravi Kopparapu, one of NASA’s scientists worked on a study released on Thursday. “Not all stars are the same. Neither does any planet. “
The estimate of 300 million planets is an extremely conservative number, NASA said. A 2013 study, which did not take into account the temperature of the stars, said there could be 8.8 billion “Earth-like” planets in the Milky Way alone.
Both studies used data from the Kepler Space Telescope, which located planets in the Milky Way from 2009 to 2018. In all that time, Kepler was only able to view 0.25 percent of the galaxy, NASA said. , leaving the researchers to estimate the remaining 99.75% based on that fragment.
NASA collaborated with scientists from around the world to study, with the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission providing important data on the temperature of the stars.
“Kepler already told us there were billions of planets, but now we know that a good portion of those planets could be rocky and habitable,” lead author Steve Bryson said. “Although this achievement is far from being a final value and water on a planet’s surface is only one of many factors that support life, it is extremely exciting that we have calculated that these worlds are so common with such high safety and security. precision.”
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