A third of stars like our sun may have Earth-like planets (Yahoo! News)

CalTech study of Kepler results says numerous habitable exoplanets could exist

Several habitable Earth-like exoplanets have been spotted recently:?50 of them, in fact, by the High Accuracy Radial velocity Planetary Search (HARPS), including one that may be the?most Earth-like yet. But in the sheer vastness of space, our Earth is but a tiny speck, so more habitable (or?Goldilocks) planets are definitely out there.

To get an idea of the possible number and rate of Earth-like planets, Wesley Traub of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena took?Kepler observatory data, and used mathematical guesswork. The result? A third of all stars that are like our sun might have at least one Earth-like planet.

Kepler observatory scanned 150,000 stars within 136 days, and found evidence of?1,235 potential exoplanets or planets outside our solar system. A third of the overall number of planets Kepler discovered are too close to the sun (and hence, cannot support life) mainly due to Kepler's limitation ? Kepler isn't powerful enough to see planets in habitable areas, or areas far enough from the sun's heat.

For his?study, Traub narrowed the list down to FGK class stars, which according to?stellar classification are the stars most like our own sun. The result of his mathematical computations suggests that there are numerous terrestrial and habitable planets out there, with his definition of terrestrial being rocky planets half or twice the size of Earth that can sustain life. And while their existence cannot be proven right now, just the possibility of them really being out there fuels our drive to better our technology so that one day, we might catch a glimpse of a planet just like ours.

Cornell via?DVICE,?MIT,?PopSci

[Image credit:?ESO]

This article was written by Mariella Moon and originally appeared on Tecca

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