8.8 Billion Habitable Earth-like Planets Exist in Milky Way Alone

Space is massive, but it may not be so lonely for us after all: A new research reports that the Milky Way is abundant with billions of Earth-size-planets that are orbiting stars just like our sun, and their orbit exists in the Goldilocks zone — not too cold and not too hot for life.

Space scientists using NASA data have measured for the first time that in our galaxy (Milky Way) alone, there are more than 8.8 billion stars with Earth-like planets in the Goldilocks zone.

The research was published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS).

For perspective only, that's more Earth-size planets than there are humans on Earth.

As for what it says about the betting odds that there is life somewhere out there, it means "just in our galaxy alone, that's 8.8 billion times an biological dice is thrown for the bet of life," said research co-author Geoff Marcy, an old planet hunter from the University of California (UoC) at Berkeley.