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There are at least 300 million habitable planets in the Milky Way, as new research from NASA has shown, suggesting that humanity is less likely to be alone in the universe.
Research based on scans from NASA’s Kepler Planet Hunting Telescope suggests that about half of the stars with a similar temperature to our Sun may have a rocky planet capable of having liquid water on its surface.
This means planets could potentially host life, scientists believe.
Some of these potential planets are also very close to Earth (relatively speaking) with the closest likely being just 20 light-years away.
Four are within 30 light years of Earth, the researchers say.
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“Kepler had already told us there were billions of planets, but now we know that a good portion of those planets could be rocky and habitable,” said lead author Steve Bryson, a researcher at NASA’s Ames Research Center. California’s Silicon Valley.
“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”.
Researchers say there could be many, many more than 300 million habitable planets, according to research published in the Astronomical Journal.
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These are the minimum numbers of such planets based on the most conservative estimate that 7% of the Sun-like stars host such worlds.
However, at the expected average rate of 50%, there could be many more.
For the purposes of calculating this rate of occurrence, the team looked at exoplanets between 0.5 and 1.5 times that of Earth, shrinking to planets that are most likely rocky.
The study is based on observations from NASA’s Kepler space probe (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) which opens its doors for 2 days. (Photo by Mintaha Neslihan Eroglu / Anadolu Agency / Getty Images)
This new discovery is a significant step forward in Kepler’s original mission to understand how many potentially habitable worlds exist in our galaxy.
Previous estimates of the frequency, also known as the occurrence rate, of such planets ignored the relationship between the star’s temperature and the type of light emitted by the star and absorbed by the planet.
The new analysis takes these relationships into account and provides a more complete understanding of whether a given planet may or may not be able to support liquid water and potentially life.
This approach is made possible by combining Kepler’s final data set on planetary signals with data on the energy production of each star from an extensive data collection from the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission.
“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 made us speculate,” said Ravi Kopparapu, an author of the paper and a NASA scientist Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
“Gaia’s star data allowed us to look at these planets and their stars in a whole new way.”
“Not all stars are the same,” Kopparapu said. “Neither does any planet.”
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