Jan
12th
Thu
12th
Just 20 years ago, astronomers had no direct evidence that planets orbited other stars. Now, researchers estimate the Milky Way galaxy contains a huge number of planets, with Earth-sized worlds vastly outnumbering the rest. “We find that, on average, every star has a planet, and since there are at least 100 billion stars, there are at least 100 billion planets,” said astronomer Kailash Sahu of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, who co-authored the new study, appearing Jan. 11 in Nature.
