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Billions Of Habitable Worlds Likely In The Milky Way
Artist’s impression of sunset on the super-Earth world Gliese 667 Cc. Credit: ESO/L. Calçada
Could there be ‘tens of billions’ of habitable worlds in our own galaxy? That’s the results from a new study that searched for rocky planets in the habitable zones around red dwarf stars. An international team of astronomers using ESO’s HARPS spectrograph now estimates that there are tens of billions of such planets in the Milky Way galaxy, with probably about one hundred in the Sun’s immediate neighborhood, less than 30 light years away.
“Our new observations with HARPS mean that about 40% of all red dwarf stars have a super-Earth orbiting in the habitable zone where liquid water can exist on the surface of the planet,” said Xavier Bonfils, from IPAG, Observatoire des Sciences de l’Univers de Grenoble, France, and the leader of the team. “Because red dwarfs are so common — there are about 160 billion of them in the Milky Way — this leads us to the astonishing result that there are tens of billions of these planets in our galaxy alone.”
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Read the rest of Billions of Habitable Worlds Likely in the Milky Way (597 words)
© nancy for Universe Today, 2012. | Permalink | No comment |
Post tags: ESO, Extrasolar Planets, Red Dwarf Stars
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