NASA's Kepler space telescope, now crippled and its four-year mission at an end, nevertheless provided enough data to answer its main research question: How many of the 200 billion stars in our galaxy¹ have potentially habitable planets? Based on a statistical² analysis of all the Kepler observations, University of California, Berkeley, and University of Hawaii, Manoa, astronomers³ now estimate that one in five stars like the sun have planets about the size of Earth and a surface temperature conducive⁴ to（有益于） life.

 

Given that about 20 percent of stars are sun-like, the researchers say, that amounts to several tens of billions of potentially habitable, Earth-size planets in the Milky⁵ Way Galaxy.

 

"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," said UC Berkeley graduate student Erik Petigura, who led the analysis of the Kepler data.

 

"It's been nearly 20 years since the discovery of the first extrasolar（太阳系以外的） planet around a normal star. Since then, we have learned that most stars have planets of some size orbiting them, and that Earth-size planets are relatively⁶ common in close-in orbits that are too hot for life," said Andrew Howard, a former UC Berkeley post-doctoral fellow who is now on the faculty⁷ of the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaii. "With this result, we've come home, in a sense, by showing that planets like our Earth are relatively common throughout the Milky Way Galaxy."

 

Petigura, Howard and Geoffrey Marcy, UC Berkeley professor of astronomy, will publish their analysis and findings this week in the online early edition of the journal Proceedings⁸ of the National Academy of Sciences.

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