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About 7% of the roughly 200 billion stars in the Milky Way are stars like the Sun, so it’s possible that these planets look like Earth.
“This is the first time that all the pieces have been put together to provide a reliable measure of the number of potentially habitable planets in the galaxy,” said study co-author Geoff Coglin, exoplanet researcher at SETI and the Mountain View Institute in California, in a statement.
“We are one step closer to knowing if we are alone in the universe,” added Coglin, who also heads the Kepler Office of Science, which is dedicated to analyzing data collected by the space telescope. NASA’s Kepler Planetary Fighter.
A large team led by Steve Bryson from NASA’s Ames Research Center in California looked at observations made by Kepler, who worked from 2009 to 2018, and was an incredibly prolific space probe, having discovered more than 2,800 exoplanets to date, i.e. Almost two-thirds of the planets in all known extraterrestrial worlds.
Kepler’s number continues to rise as researchers continue to examine his massive dataset. Thousands of Kepler “candidates” are waiting to be examined with further analysis and observations.
Bryson and his colleagues also looked at data on the stellar properties of ESA’s GAIA spacecraft, which accurately maps a billion stars in the Milky Way.
The team used this information to estimate rates of occurrence of rocky planets in habitable regions of solar stars.
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