Astronomers estimate that there are more than 100 billion Earth-like worlds in the Milky Way galaxy that could host life. Don’t you think it’s a great number? According to astronomers, there are about 500 billion galaxies in the known universe, which means about 50,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (5 × 1022) habitable planets. This makes sense when there is only one universe.
In fact, experts now believe there are about 400 billion stars in our Milky Way, but some astrophysicists believe our galaxy’s stars make up 1 trillion. Therefore, the number may seem small. This means there could be over 100 billion planets in the Milky Way alone.
But astronomers can’t see our galaxy from the outside, so they can’t know exactly how many planets there are in the Milky Way galaxy.
To do this, experts calculate the mass of our galaxy and how much of this mass is made up of stars. Based on these calculations, scientists believe our galaxy has at least 400 billion stars, but as we mentioned above, that number could increase dramatically. I have. Some calculations put the Milky Way on average between 800 billion and 3.2 trillion planets, but some experts believe the number could be as high as 8 trillion.
Plus, see what NASA has to say and find out that the space agency believes there are at least 1,500 planets within 50 light years of Earth. These conclusions are based on his six-year observations by the PLANET-Probing Lensing Anomalies NETwork collaboration formed in 1995. The study concluded that there are far more Earth-sized planets than Jupiter-sized worlds.
In 2013, Dr. Phil Yock of the University of Auckland Department of Physics said:”Kepler has discovered Earth-sized planets very close to their parent stars, and astronomers estimate there are about 17 billion such planets in the Milky Way galaxy.
These worlds are hotter than our planet, although some could be of a comparable temperature (and could, therefore, be habitable) if they are orbiting a cool star called a red dwarf.”
“Our proposal is to measure the number of Earth-mass planets orbiting stars at distances typically twice the Sun-Earth distance. Our planets will, therefore, be cooler than the Earth. By interpolating between the Kepler and MOA results, we should obtain a good estimate of the number of Earth-like, habitable planets in the Milky Way. We predict a number in the order of 100 billion. Of course, it will be a long way from measuring this number to actually finding inhabited planets, but it will be a step along the way.”
The number seems to be increasing every year, which is kinda cool.
If we take a peek at the recent data provided by the Kepler space mission, we’ll find how astronomers believe approximately 40 BILLION Earth-sized planets orbiting habitable zones of Sun-like stars and red dwarfs in the Milky Way galaxy alone.