Very interesting! Scientist’s used NASA’s Kepler space telescope and found that small Earth-like planets are more common than realized. This evidence proves that life could be developed/could already exist somewhere else in our galaxy. Click below to read more.

Melissa Nash

The potential for life developing elsewhere in our galaxy is apparently greater than we realized.

Scientists analyzing data captured by NASA’s Kepler space telescope have determined that smaller, Earth-like planets are more common than previously thought – increasing the odds that some of them have the necessary preconditions to allow for life.

Previously, it was believed that planets of that size required stars rich in heavy elements like iron and silicon to form – much as gas giants such as Jupiter do.

“What we found was, there wasn’t a very strong corelation between Jupiter[-sized] planets from the smaller planets,” the study’s leader, Lars Buchhave, an astrophysicist at the Niels Bohr Institute and the Centre for Star and Planet Formation at the University of Copenhagen, told the News.

“In other words, we don’t need a lot of stuff in the disk of the planetary system to form small planets like here on Earth,” he said. “And that means – or could mean at least – since we don’t need a special environment for the planets to form, then we could form planets around a wide range of stars and planets like Earth could be common in our galaxy.”

Buchhave’s team studied more than 226 planets smaller than Neptune orbiting 150 stars in the Milky Way and found that they developed in a wide range of conditions. They discovered that these planets could even develop around stars with lower metallicity than our sun.

The findings of the three-year project have been published in the latest issue of the scientific journal, Nature.

“The data suggest that small planets may form around stars with a wide range of metallicities — that nature is opportunistic and prolific, finding pathways we might otherwise have thought difficult,” Natalie Batalha, Kepler mission scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center, said in a statement.

Just how opportunistic, though, is nature? More small planets increases the probability that some are the right distance from the star they orbit to be the right temperature to allow for life-sustaining water, for example.

Paging Steven Spielberg.

“If you want to take the leap to life, if you have a lot of planets that remind you of the Earth, perhaps life can exist there as well,” says Bucchave. “But nobody really knows that.”