There are at least a billion earth-like planets in our galaxy

    Last week, the media vigorously discussed the new find of the Kepler telescope. According to information from the press release, the processing of the data he collected made it possible to open the next exoplanet Kepler-452b . Its uniqueness consisted in the fact that today it is the most similar to our Earth from all exoplanets found. This planet was discovered in a pack of 500 objects, which, upon further consideration, may turn out to be exoplanets.

    It was reported that it is most likely rocky, its orbit is in the “habitable zone”, and the star of this system is also a yellow dwarf of type G, which is about 6 billion years old. And its diameter, most likely, differs from the diameter of the Earth by 60% in a larger direction. And a year it lasts almost as long as ours. However, NASA astrophysicist Natalya Batalya(Natalie Batalha) is in a hurry to cool the ardent minds of space enthusiasts , but also to reassure those who want to find neighbors in space.

    No one has seen this planet - it is located at a distance of 1400 light-years from Earth, and there are simply no tools that would allow it to be examined and studied in detail. For the same reason, it is not 100% known whether it is really rocky. Naturally, it is impossible to determine whether it has an atmosphere and liquid water on the surface.

    The Kepler telescope searches for exoplanets by the transit method - it tracks the change in the luminosity of a star at the moment of passage of a planet against its background. In this way, only sufficiently large planets can be detected, and besides, only those whose orbit lies in the same plane with the observation point.

    Therefore, the few characteristics of the planet that we know are the period of revolution around the star (385 days) and the approximate size. We do not even know the exact diameter of the star.

    The Kepler telescope was originally designed to search for exoplanets. It was launched in March 2009, and in May 2013 failed. Analysis of the data will continue for several more years, and all this time we will find different planets. But the main goal of the experiment is to clarify the approximate number of exoplanets in our galaxy, since the telescope studied only a small portion of space with the goal of statistical extrapolation of the results.

    And now, thanks to him, Natalya explains, we already know that in our galaxy there should be about a billion earth-like planets. Not just planets - but rocky planets with liquid water on the surface and orbiting stars similar to our Sun.

    There are a huge number of planets in our galaxy (and, apparently, in other galaxies), of different sizes and varieties. At the same time, as Natalia writes, in the orbit from 15% to 25% of the stars are precisely earth-like planets. Such statistics were obtained by studying stellar systems in which the red luminary was a star. A study of the materials obtained from Kepler suggests that the statistics for yellow and orange dwarfs are approximately the same.

    Since yellow, orange, and red dwarfs make up 90% of the galactic “population”, we can take a conservative estimate and say that 15% of the 90% of the 100 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy have planets with a diameter of 1 to 1.6 Earth, and whose orbits are in the "habitable zone" of their stars. A simple calculation leads to the presence of almost 14 billion of these planets. If it is limited only to yellow dwarfs, then this number is reduced to a billion earth-like planets in our galaxy - and this is the minimum estimate.

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