The 500 million planets in the Milky Way there could be life

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The 500 million planets in the Milky Way there could be life

Written by Natascia

Monday, 28 March 2011 11:20

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In our galaxy there could be up to 500 million planets suitable for life, reveals data provided by the Kepler space telescope. The number of extrasolar planets may reach 50 billion, informs site Rambler.ru, cited by Agerpres. Data on potential habitable planets were announced at the annual conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), by William Borutski, who leads the team of researchers working with Kepler.

Statistical analysis of data collected by the telescope showed that 44% of stars have planetary systems in the Galaxy. Given that the galaxy has approximately 100 billion stars, it appears they may have about 50 billion planets. Of these, approximately 500 million may prove to be the so-called 'life zones', that is relevant to the star at about the same distance that Earth is the Sun. All these estimates are of course approximate, but on a global scale is still impressive. Even if it would be habitable only 1% of this number, there would still însemană five million worlds like Earth.
Borutski said also that the planets Kepler already studied, 10.5% have sizes close to the Earth, 7.3% is slightly higher (up to 200% of our planet's mass, the so-called 'super -Earth '

, other 20.8% are comparable with the planet Neptune and 5.2% related to Jupiter class, being six times larger than Earth.
In total, the telescope found planets like Earth 1200, of which 54 are in the area of life. Kepler telescope was launched into orbit by NASA in March 2009. His main task is to search for exoplanets. In this mission, he focuses only on a certain part of the sky in the constellation Cygnus, which is about 150 thousand stars.

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