In the Milky Way alone there could be hundreds of billions of planets similar to Earth, capable of supporting life. That is what emerges from the calculations made by a team of planetary scientists from the Australian National University from data obtained on the more than a thousand ex-worlds that have been discovered by NASA’s Kepler space telescope.
This study, promoted by Tim Bovaird and Charley Lineweaver, maintains that a typical star system usually has two planets in the so-called zone of habitability, a region in which the distance of these objects from their star allows the presence of liquid water on its surface. and the development of life. “The ingredients for this emergence are abundant, and now we know that this also occurs with habitable environments,” says Linewear, professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the aforementioned institution. “ We have used the Titius-Bode law, a hypothesis raised in the 18th century that relates the distance between a planet and its star and its position in the system, and the information provided by the Kepler observatory to predict the place where the worlds that this probe cannot see would be found ”, he indicates.
For Linewear, “ what is not clear is that the universe is bustling with aliens of similar intelligence to ours , capable of building radio telescopes or spaceships. Otherwise, we would probably already know about them. In this sense, it is possible that the development of life runs into a bottleneck that we have not yet taken into account, or perhaps there are intelligent civilizations of some kind, but with a tendency to self-destruct ”.
