Many Billions of Rocky Planets in Habitable Zones Around Red Dwarfs in Milky Way

[Tank]

Many Billions of Rocky Planets in Habitable Zones Around Red Dwarfs in Milky Way

ScienceDaily (Mar. 28, 2012) — A new result from ESO's HARPS planet finder shows that rocky planets not much bigger than Earth are very common in the habitable zones around faint red stars. The international team estimates that there are tens of billions of such planets in the Milky Way galaxy alone, and probably about one hundred in the Sun's immediate neighbourhood. This is the first direct measurement of the frequency of super-Earths around red dwarfs, which account for 80% of the stars in the Milky Way.

..."Our new observations with HARPS mean that about 40% of all red dwarf stars have a super-Earth orbiting in the habitable zone where liquid water can exist on the surface of the planet," says Xavier Bonfils (IPAG, Observatoire des Sciences de l'Univers de Grenoble, France), the leader of the team. "Because red dwarfs are so common -- there are about 160 billion of them in the Milky Way -- this leads us to the astonishing result that there are tens of billions of these planets in our galaxy alone."...

So billions of exo-planets bask in the gentle heat emissions of these very long lived cool little stars. Life could/would be very different on these planets.

[Ali]

I wish I could go and see the kind of life that potentially lives on some of these planets.  It kind of makes me sad to know for sure that I never will.

[DeterminedJuliet]

OooOoOoo!

[Tank]

I wish I could go and see the kind of life that potentially lives on some of these planets.  It kind of makes me sad to know for sure that I never will.

T might if he becomes a spaceman and they have faster than light travel.