Billions And Billions: Our Galaxy Has At Least 100 Billion Planets, Of Which 17 Billion Are Earthlike
Heart Of The Milky Way This image was taken from Cerro Paranal in Chile and shows the region spanning the sky from the constellation of Sagittarius to Scorpius. The dark lane in the Milky Way arm hosts the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy. Stéphane Guisard/Wikimedia CommonsThere is also a cornucopia of comets. Comfortably a few years into their mission, scientists working with the Kepler Space Telescope are now getting deep into statistics. Like pollsters drawing conclusions from a small sample of voters, they're confident the few thousand planets and planet candidates they've found are good analogs for the rest of the Milky Way. And they say the Milky Way has a lot of worlds: At least one for every star, and at least one Earth-like one for every six stars. There's a ton of exo-news coming from the American Astronomical Society's winter meeting in Long Beach, Calif.,...