Scientists Estimate 8.8 Billion Planets Just Right For Life Just Our Galaxy

With an estimated 200 billion stars in our galaxy, the scientists have extrapolated that 40 billion of them are similar to our sun. With roughly one-fifth of those with Earth-size planets in the habitable temperature zone, it means “just in our Milky Way galaxy alone, that’s 8.8 billion throws of the biological dice,” study co-author Geoff Marcy, from the University of California at Berkeley, told AP.

The figure of 8.8 billion Earth-size planets, incidentally, is only a jumping-off point. The researchers were only looking at sun-like stars, which are not the most common. An earlier study concluded that up to approximately 15 percent of the more frequently occurring “Red Dwarf” stars have Earth-sized planets within the Goldilocks Zone. Red dwarfs range in mass from a low of 0.075 solar masses) to about 50 percent of the Sun – often incorrectly described as a yellow dwarf – and have a surface temperature of less than 4,000 Kelvin.

Marcy says if you add them all together, you’re looking at 40 billion stars potentially ripe for life.