The odds are high that we’re not alone in the universe. In fact, there may be 100 billion Earth-like planets in the Milky Way, or one for every sun-type star in the galaxy, said Alan Boss, a Carnegie Institution astronomer and author of “The Crowded Universe: The Search for Living Planets,” in a new CNN report.
Based on the number of “super-Earths,” or planets several times the mass of the Earth, but smaller than gas giants such as Jupiter, that have been discovered already among the 330 exoplanets we know of outside the solar system, Boss predicts that any of them that have liquid water could also have life.
“Now that’s not saying that they’re all going to be crawling with intelligent human beings or even dinosaurs,” he said in the article. “But I would suspect that the great majority of them at least will have some sort of primitive life, like bacteria or some of the multicellular creatures that populated our Earth for the first 3 billion years of its existence.”
Soon, NASA will launch the Kepler Mission, which contains a telescope that will study 100,000 stars in the Cygnus-Lyra region of the Milky Way for more than three years, the report said, in an aim to detect small dips in a star’s brightness that could indicate the presence of orbiting planets. The mission is scheduled for launch March 5.
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