There Are 6 Billion Earth-Like Planets in the Milky Way Galaxy Alone, Astronomers Suggest
Maybe you believe that one Earth is sufficient. However, what if the number was in the billions? According to a recent research study, the number of Earth-like planets in our Milky Way galaxy can approach 6 billion.
Astronomers at the College of British Columbia (UBC) examined information from NASA’s Kepler project and also came to a startling conclusion. From 2009 to 2018, the Kepler planet-hunting satellite gathered information on 200,000 stars.
The researchers’ criterion for picking such a planet added that it had to be rocky, around the same dimension as Earth, and orbiting a star like our Sun. This planet had to be in the habitable area of its star, where the conditions would be ideal for the existence of water and life.
Michelle Kunimoto, a UBC researcher that formerly identified 17 recent planets (“ exoplanets“) outside our Solar System, stated that their calculations “set an upper limit of 0.18 Earth-like planets per G-type star.” In other words, there are roughly 5 worlds for every Sun.
Kunimoto used a method known as ‘forward modeling’ to undertake the research study, which permitted her to overcome the problem that Earth-like planets are hard to detect due to their tiny size and orbital distance from their star.
“I began by simulating the complete populace of exoplanets around the stars Kepler searched,” expounded the scientist in UBC’s press release. “I marked each planet as ‘spotted’ or ‘missed’ depending on how probably it was my planet search algorithm would have discovered them. Then, I compared the spotted planets to my actual catalog of planets. If the simulation developed a close match, then the first population was likely a great representation of the actual populace of planets orbiting those stars.”
While the researchers came up with an astounding number of hypothetical Earths, this doesn´t necessarily mean the number of such planets exists or whether they have life resemble to ours. However, this recent estimate increases the likelihood that comparable worlds exist.
Read The Original Article On Universe Today.
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