Space Research Hints at Possibility of Billions of Habitable Planets
A team of researchers say that new data shows there's plenty of planets capable of having liquid water.
| Posted Wednesday, March 28, 2012, at 4:22 PM
Photo by NASA/Getty Images.
New research suggests that there could be billions of habitable planets in our Milky Way system. Yes, that's billions with a B.
The data generating such speculation was published Wednesday and comes from the European Southern Observatory, which took a close look at and around 102 red dwarfs, stars that are fainter and less-massive than the sun and that are believed to make up roughly 80 percent of the 200 billion or so stars in our galaxy.
The research team found nine planets slightly larger than Earth, two of which were in the habitable zone—where temperatures are right for liquid water to exist—around their parent star.
Space.com explains that thanks to some extrapolating, the researchers were able to estimate that tens of billions of these possibly habitable planets are to be found in the Milky Way, with about 100 estimated to be "in the immediate neighborhood of the sun."
Unfortunately for the folks that want to ditch Earth, there won’t be space migration any time soon—the planets are about 30 light years away and probably not habitable in the way we are used to since red dwarfs are prone to stellar eruptions or flares.
You can read more on the findings over at Space.com and at PC Magazine.
