Whoa! Milky Way May Harbor 300 Million Potentially Habitable Planets
This illustration represents the legacy of NASA's Kepler space telescope which discovered more than 2,800 confirmed exoplanets of the known 4,374. It spent nine years collecting data from orbit before it ran out of fuel in 2018. NASA / Ames Research Center / W. Stenzel / D. Rutter And I thought there were a lot of beetles! But with "only" 350,000 species, beetles are far outnumbered by the estimated 300 million potentially habitable planets now thought to exist in the Milky Way Galaxy. According to new research using data from NASA's former Kepler space telescope, about half of the stars similar in temperature to our sun could have a rocky planet capable of supporting liquid water on its surface. Although it's not the only ingredient required for life, liquid water is the golden key that unlocks life's potential as we know it. 300 million is a conservative estimate according to the study released this week by a team of scientists who worked on the Kepler ...