Astronomers at California-Berkely University and University of Hawaii, using NASA’s space telescope, estimate that there are tens of billions of habitable planets in the Milky Way alone. This means one planet for every human on earth and then some. The closest orbits a star that you can see when looking in the night sky. "When you look up at the thousands of stars in the night sky, the nearest sun-like star with an Earth-size planet in its habitable zone is probably only 12 light years away, and can be seen with the naked eye. That is amazing." UC Berkeley graduate student Erik Petigura, the leader of the team that analyzed data from the Kepler, said.
The astronomers haven’t seen these planets. The Kepler telescope photographed 150,000 of the 300 billion stars in the Milky Way every 30 minutes for four years. It looked for when orbiting planets passed between the camera and the star, causing a slight change in brightness of that star. Analyzing the data, the astronomers say, they found 3,000 planet candidates.
This got me thinking, “Maybe there is other life out there.” There are this many habitable planets out there, maybe there is other life. Maybe, they don’t look like E.T. or Yoda, but maybe there are human-like creatures somewhere in the universe or even the Milky Way itself.
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