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Old November 3rd, 2020 #85
Ray Allan
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Join Date: May 2014
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More than half of all sunlike stars in the Milky Way may have a habitable planet

Quote:
Our Milky Way galaxy abounds with potentially Earth-like planets, a new study suggests.

On average, each sunlike star in the Milky Way harbors between 0.4 and 0.9 rocky planets in its "habitable zone," the just-right range of orbital distances where liquid water could be stable on a world's surface, researchers have found.

About 7% of the Milky Way's 200 billion or so stars are "G dwarfs" like the sun, so that's a lot of potentially Earth-like real estate.

"This is the first time that all the pieces have been put together to provide a reliable measurement of the number of potentially habitable planets in the galaxy," study co-author Jeff Coughlin, an exoplanet researcher at the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute in Mountain View, California said in a statement.

"This is a key term of the Drake Equation, used to estimate the number of communicable civilizations," said Coughlin, who also directs the Kepler Science Office, which is dedicated to analyzing data gathered by NASA's planet-hunting Kepler space telescope. "We're one step closer on the long road to finding out if we are alone in the cosmos."
https://www.space.com/habitable-plan...tars-milky-way
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