Astronomers estimate that there could be over 100 billion Earth-like worlds in the Milky Way that could harbor life. Think it’s a big number? According to astronomers, there are approximately 500 billion galaxies in the universe, which means that there are about 50,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 habitable planets.
This is, of course, if there is only one universe.
Experts believe that there are about 400 billion stars inside our Milky Way galaxy, but some astrophysicists believe that there are a trillion stars in our galaxy. If so, that means there could be 100 billion planets in the Milky Way that could have life.
Because astronomers can’t see our galaxy in its entirety, they can’t know exactly how many planets are likely to have life. So experts calculate the mass of our galaxy and calculate how much of that mass is made up of stars. Based on these calculations, scientists believe that our galaxy is home to at least 400 billion stars.
According to some calculations, the Milky Way may contain, on average, from 800 billion to 3.2 trillion planets on which life is possible. However, some experts believe the number could be as high as eight trillion.
In addition, if we look at what NASA scientists say, we find out that there are approximately 1500 of the above planets located within 50 light-years of Earth.
These conclusions are based on observations made over a period of 6 years by the Anomaly Lensing Network founded in 1995. The researchers concluded that there are many more Earth-sized planets than Jupiter-sized planets. In 2013, Dr. Phil Yock of the Department of Physics at the University of Auckland said:
“Kepler finds Earth-sized planets that are fairly close to their host stars, and astronomers estimate there are about 17 billion such planets in the Milky Way. These worlds are much hotter than our planet, although some of them may have similar temperatures (and thus be habitable) if they orbit a cold star called a red dwarf.
“Our proposal is to measure the number of earth-mass planets orbiting stars at distances typically twice the distance from the Sun to the Earth. Therefore, our planets will be colder than the Earth. The Kepler and MOA results suggest that we should get a good estimate of the number of Earth-like planets in the Milky Way. We predict the number of such planets to be around 100 billion.”