Scientists reveal 200 billion worlds like Earth in our galaxy
A NEW study by planetary scientists have calculated that there could be hundreds of billions of Earth-like planets in our galaxy which might support life.
The new estimates are based on applying a 200 year-old idea to the thousands of exo-planets discovered by the Kepler space telescope, which found the standard star has about two Earth-like planets in orbit.
These two planets can be found in the so-called 'goldilocks zone', named for the correct distance from the star where liquid water, crucial for life, can exist.
Researchers from the Australian National University applied the 200 year-old Titius-Bode relation, which predicts a planet's existence based on their sequence orbiting around a sun.
It has already been used to predict the existence of planets in our own Solar System and by looking at a system where it was known to hold three or more planets, detected by the Kepler space telescope, the team worked out two planets exist in the goldilock zone of each star.
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It has already been estimated that the Milky Way has more than 100 billion stars.
“The ingredients for life are plentiful, and we now know that habitable environments are plentiful,” said Associate Professor Lineweaver, from the ANU Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics and the Research School of Earth Sciences.
“However, the universe is not teeming with aliens with human-like intelligence that can build radio telescopes and space ships. Otherwise we would have seen or heard from them.
“It could be that there is some other bottleneck for the emergence of life that we haven’t worked out yet. Or intelligent civilisations evolve, but then self-destruct.”
The Kepler space telescope is biased towards seeing planets very close to their stars, that are too hot for liquid water, but the team extrapolated from Kepler’s results using the theory that were used to predict the existence of Uranus.
“We used the Titius-Bode relation and Kepler data to predict the positions of planets that Kepler is unable to see,” Associate Professor Lineweaver added.
