Earth-size Planets are Common, Kepler Retrospective Finds

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https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-news/kepler-retrospective-earth-like-planets-common/

Source: Sky and Telescope Magazine. 

Excerpt: ...NASA’s Kepler telescope was retired a few years ago, but ongoing analyses of its data, both by professional astronomers and citizen scientists, are still producing new results. ...Kepler has found more than 2,600 exoplanets (and counting). Now, an international collaboration led by Steve Bryson, a researcher at NASA Ames, has announced a refined estimate. The team, including NASA scientists, SETI researchers, academics, former-Keplerites, and other planet hunters, performed a statistical analysis that combined Kepler’s planet catalog and stellar data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia observatory. They found that about half of the Sun-like stars in our galaxy could have a rocky planet in their habitable zones. ...The study, soon to be published in The Astronomical Journal, predicts that there are at least 300 million habitable-zone rocky worlds in the Milky Way. A handful of these are within a few light-years of Earth. This result assumes that the section of the sky Kepler monitored for four years is representative of the whole galaxy.... See also The New York Times article https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/05/science/astronomy-exoplanets-kepler.html


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