The Milky Way Is Home To More Than 100 Billion Alien Planets

Posted by Alcyone _Featured_, Space Thursday, January 3rd, 2013

Space.com via Business Insider

Our Milky Way galaxy is home to at least 100 billion alien planets, and possibly many more, a new study suggests.

“It’s a staggering number, if you think about it,” lead author Jonathan Swift, of Caltech in Pasadena, said in a statement.

“Basically there’s one of these planets per star.”

Swift and his colleagues arrived at their estimate after studying a five-planet system called Kepler-32, which lies about 915 light-years from Earth.

The five worlds were detected by NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope, which flags the tiny brightness dips caused when exoplanets cross their star’s face from the instrument’s perspective.

The Kepler-32 planets orbit an M dwarf, a type of star that is smaller and cooler than our sun.

M dwarfs are the most common star in the Milky Way, accounting for about 75 percent of the galaxy’s 100 billion or so stars, researchers said.

 

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