It’s been long thought that there are many other planets in our Milky Way, but recently it’s been discovered that “many” was a gross understatement! Turns out, our milky way is home to billions of Earth-like planets!
Scientists have examined a section of the Milky Way and studied the different planets that transit in front of their main star and found out that about 17% of the Sun-like stars have a rocky planet that orbits it.
The Milky Way is home to nearly a hundred billion stars, which means that approximately 17 billion different Earth-like planets out there! And those are just the rocky planets! Our Milky Way could probably be host to no less than one hundred million planets overall!
DID YOU KNOW?
- Galileo proved that the Milky Way was made up of stars by using his telescope
- There are things that look like spiral-y arms that come out from the centre of the Milky Way
- It will take the Sun about 220 million years to complete a rotation of the Milky Way
- The Milky Way is composed of a layer of new stars called the disk, a centre containing old stars called the bulge and a halo which contains dark matter and globular clusters.