Is there any recent discoveries in exoplanet research revealed about the potential for life beyond Earth?
In: Planetary Science
It depends on what you mean by recent. But we now have results of a number of exoplanet discovery searches. We have found a number of planets in the “goldilock” zone and even nicely sized rocky planets. So Earth is not the only one out there. But more importantly these studies did not try to specifically search out these types of planets. Instead we have been looking for larger planets and planets further from their star as these are easier to see. And these searches have been mostly focused at a small number of stars. The reason for this is that we can map the numbers, sizes and orbits of planets in typical planetary systems and then extrapolate from this. So even though we have only found a couple of “perfect” planets we can see from the data that the reason we can not find more is because our instruments are not able to detect them. We find lots of planets that are bigger then the Earth and lots of planets that are further from their star then the Earth and we know our instruments could not detect smaller or closer planets then those we do see. From this data we can see that most stars have planets around them and a lot of them should be in the same size and orbit as the Earth. Early research estimated that there were maybe 100 planets in the galaxy which could support life, but in reality there are millions of them.
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