NASA has found that there can be livable planets in Milky Way. In fact, our galaxy could be filled with at least 300 million potentially habitable planets. This means planets that could support life.

Scientists studied data collected by NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope to find planets that were habitable. These potentially habitable planets are rocky planets capable of supporting liquid water on their surface.

Some of these planets are quite close. The closest is around 20 light-years away, which is near, in terms of objects in space.

How did they identify the potentially livable planets in Milky Way? 

NASA says that there are about 100 to 400 billion stars in our Milky Way galaxy. Every star in the sky likely has at least one planet around it. This means, there are trillions of planets out there, of which we have only discovered only a few thousand.

Out of these stars, they looked for stars similar to our own Sun in age and temperature. They also looked for rocky exoplanets with a similar size to Earth.

The planets also could not be too far or too close to their star. Too close means it would be too hot and too far means it would be too cold.

After calculating all these,  scientists estimated (guessed) that 7% of Sun-like stars could host habitable worlds. That’s how they came up with the 300 million potential planets. NASA says that the number could even be much higher.

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