Home / Astronomy & Space / Astronomers conclude habitable planets are common

Astronomers conclude habitable planets are common

Astronomers from the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa and the University of California, Berkeley now estimate that one in five stars like the sun have planets about the size of Earth and a surface temperature conducive to life. This conclusion is based on a statistical analysis of all observations from NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope.

Though Kepler is now crippled, it nevertheless provided enough data to complete its mission objective: to determine how many of the 100 billion stars in our galaxy have potentially habitable planets. A habitable planet is defined as one that is approximately the size of Earth and that is the right temperature for liquid water.

“What this means is, when you look up at the thousands of stars in the night sky, the nearest sun-like star with an Earth-size planet in its habitable zone is probably only 12 light years away and can be seen with the naked eye. That is amazing,” said Erik Petigura, who led the analysis of the Kepler data. Petigura is a UC Berkeley graduate student working at UH Manoa for a year.

“It’s been nearly 20 years since the discovery of the first extrasolar planet around a normal star. Since then we have learned that most stars have planets of some size and that Earth-size planets are relatively common in close-in orbits that are too hot for life,” said Andrew Howard, an astronomer at the Institute for Astronomy at UH Manoa. “With this result we’ve come home, in a sense, by showing that planets like our Earth are relatively common throughout the Milky Way galaxy.”

Petigura, Howard and Geoffrey Marcy, a UC Berkeley professor of astronomy, will publish their findings online this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.  In addition to the public data from Kepler, their analysis depended on spectra of the planet-hosting stars from the W. M. Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea in Hawaii.



Last week, however, Howard, Marcy and their colleagues provided hope that many such planets actually are rocky like the Earth. They reported that one Earth-size planet discovered by Kepler – albeit, an uninhabitable planet with a temperature of more than 2,000 Kelvin – is the same density as Earth and likely composed of rock and iron, like Earth.


What distinguishes the team’s analysis from previous analyses of Kepler data is that they subjected Petigura’s planet-finding algorithms to a battery of tests to measure how many habitable zone, Earth-size planets they missed. Petigura actually introduced fake planets into the Kepler data to determine which ones his software could detect and which it couldn’t. Their study is also the first census of Earth-size planets from Kepler to accurately estimate the host star’s habitable zones using data from the Keck Observatory.

Accounting for missed planets, as well as the fact that only a small fraction of planets are oriented so that they cross in front of their host star as seen from Earth and therefore could be detected by Kepler, allowed them to estimate that 22 percent of all sun-like stars in the galaxy have Earth-size planets in their habitable zones.



PNAS Early Edition: The Prevalence of Earth-Size Planets Orbiting Sun-Like Stars


Source:  An Institute for Astronomy press release