Many Billions of Rocky Planets in the Habitable Zones around Red Dwarfs in the Milky Way

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Source:  European Southern Observatory (ESO)
 Excerpt: A new result from ESO’s HARPS planet finder shows that rocky planets not much bigger than Earth are very common in the habitable zones around faint red stars. The international team estimates that there are tens of billions of such planets in the Milky Way galaxy alone, and probably about one hundred in the Sun’s immediate neighbourhood. … red dwarf stars…are faint and cool compared to the Sun, but very common and long-lived, and therefore account for 80% of all the stars in the Milky Way. "… about 40% of all red dwarf stars have a super-Earth orbiting in the habitable zone where liquid water can exist on the surface of the planet,” says Xavier Bonfils …. “Because red dwarfs are so common — there are about 160 billion of them in the Milky Way — this leads us to the astonishing result that there are tens of billions of these planets in our galaxy alone.” The HARPS team surveyed a carefully chosen sample of 102 red dwarf stars in the southern skies over a six-year period. A total of nine super-Earths (planets with masses between one and ten times that of Earth) were found, including two inside the habitable zones of Gliese 581 (eso0915) and Gliese 667 C respectively. … more massive planets, similar to Jupiter and Saturn in our Solar System, are found to be rare around red dwarfs….

 http://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1214/

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