5th November 2013

How common are habitable planets?

NASA's Kepler space telescope, now crippled and its four-year mission at an end, nevertheless provided enough data to complete its mission objective: to determine how many of the 200 billion stars in our galaxy have potentially habitable planets. Based on a statistical analysis of all the Kepler observations, astronomers at UC Berkeley and University of Hawaii, Manoa, now estimate that 22 percent of stars like the Sun have planets about the size of Earth and a surface temperature conducive to life. That amounts to several tens of billions of potentially habitable worlds.

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