9/27/2011 PERMALINK
One out of every three sun-like stars have Earth-sized planets within their habitable zone. We live in a dangerous Cosmos that regularly produces extinction level events such as asteroid and comment strikes, massive planet-scorching solar flares in stars just like our own, gamma ray burst from black holes, rouge wandering black holes and perhaps many others not yet known. In our Cosmos intelligent species must either spread across multiple star systems are suffer a premature extinction that cuts their potential lifespans short by millions of future generations off children that will never be born. The Kepler orbiting observatory is specifically designed to find Earth-like planets around nearby stars. And astronomers have now calculated the likelihood of finding such planets around other stars using the latest data from the Kepler mission. The results are very encouraging. Wesley Traub of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena has looked at nearby stars most similar to our Sun, the classifications F, G or K to see how often various types of planets surround them. "About one-third of FGK stars are predicted to have at least one terrestrial, habitable-zone planet," says Traub. So it appears that there are plenty of other potential homes for our species out there awaiting our arrival.