Billions of Planets with Life? A new report by a group of European astronomers is extremely exciting. Working at the European Southern Observatory in Chile, the scientists have completed a survey of 102 M-dwarf stars and identified a total of nine “super-Earths” — planets up to 10 times larger than Earth — circling them. Two of the nine lie in their stars’ habitable zones, the Goldilocks region where temperatures are not too hot, not too cold, but just right for liquid water and thus, conceivably, for the existence of life. In the case of an M-dwarf, the star’s cooler, dimmer fires mean that the Goldilocks zone is closer than it is around our hotter, brighter sun, but the water principle remains the same. And if you do the math for the entire galaxy, the recent survey means that tens of billions of Goldilocks planets are peppered throughout the Milky Way, with a hundred or so just in our solar system’s immediate neighborhood. For planet-hunters, that’s an especially tantalizing prospect.
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