A wealth of habitable planets in the Milky Way
Wednesday, January 11, 2012 - 15:30
in Astronomy & Space
Six years of observations of millions of stars now show how common it is for stars to have planets in orbits around them. Using a method that is sensitive to planets that lie in a habitable zone around the host stars, astronomers have discovered that most of the Milky Way's 100 billion stars have planets that are very similar to the Earth-like planets in our own solar system.