A study released this week showed that one out of every five sun-like stars in the Milky Way galaxy has a planet approximately the same size of Earth that is "properly positioned for water," according to Reuters.
The study, which is based on over three years of data collected by NASA's Kepler space telescope, showed the galaxy is home to over 10 billion possible habitable worlds.
"Planets seem to be the rule rather than exception," study leader Erik Petigura, an astronomy graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley, said according to Reuters.
The number of worlds discovered grows "exponentially" if the count also includes planets circling cooler red dwarf stars. Red dwarf stars are the most commonly found star in the galaxy.
Petigura wrote his own software program to study the space telescope's results. He found at least 10 planets "one- to two-times the diameter of Earth" circling parent stars at the appropriate distance for water, according to Reuters.
The telescope found slight "dips" in the amount of light coming from target stars in the constellation Cygnus. Some of the dips were due to orbiting planets moving in front of their parent stars.
Petigura and colleagues determined that 22 percent of 50 billion sun-like stars throughout the galaxy "should" have planets around the size of Earth positioned for water.
Scientists are currently working on making different missions for the telescope. The telescope is no longer able to look for exoplanets however, according to Reuters.
Over a year's worth of data collected by Kepler has still has to be analyzed. Kepler was launched in 2009.
In a separate Kepler study, the telescope discovered 3,538 candidate planets, 647 of which are approximately the size of Earth, according to astronomer Jason Rowe, with the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California.
Around 104 of the candidates are at the proper distance from their parent stars for water, Rowe confirmed.
"When exoplanet hunting started, everyone expected solar systems to look just like ours," Rowe said. "But we're finding quite the opposite, that there's a wide variety of systems out there. If you can imagine it, the universe probably makes it."
The research was published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and discussed at a news conference in California.
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