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FOR Research astronomers say at least 300 million planets in the Milky Way are potentially inhabited by living things. This is based on data from the Kepler Space Telescope, which reports that hundreds of planets have Earth-like properties.
“Kepler told us there are billions of planets, but we now know that most of them are likely rocky and habitable,” said Steve Bryson, astronomer at NASA’s Ames Research Center. Science notice, Monday (9/11/2020).
Read also: Mysterious radio waves detected in the Milky Way
When trying to narrow down the exoplanets that could host life, it turned out that the only planet that researchers know for sure supports life is our planet, Earth.
One of Kepler’s main goals is to help determine how many exoplanets corresponding to these three parameters might exist in the Milky Way. Bryson and his team used four years of original data from the Kepler mission, from May 2009 to May 2013.
Read also: Researcher Discover Exoplanet in the Milky Way, smaller than the Earth
On that first mission, Kepler identified 4,034 potential exoplanets and more than 2,300 of them were subsequently validated. But space telescopes have a hard time finding the smaller rocky planets.
Then the researchers came up with a method to determine a star’s Goldilocks zone based on the planet’s radius and photon flux, the number of photons per second per unit area of the star.
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