There are at least as many planets in the galaxy as there are stars. And even that is probably a vast underestimate. That's the latest bombshell from astronomers looking for planets beyond our solar system
. Phil Plait at Bad Astronomy
will have a post on this soon, but for now, here's a little quote salad for you: “Planets are like bunnies; you don’t just get one, you get a bunch,” said Seth Shostak, a senior astronomer at the SETI Institute who was not involved in this research. “So really, the number of planets in the Milky Way is probably like five or 10 times the number of stars. That’s something like a trillion planets.” (via PopSci
) “We think about one-sixth of stars should have a Jupiter-like planet, half have a Neptune-sized planet, and two-thirds should have an Earth,” said Kailash Sahu, an author of the Nature paper
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