Scientists think that there are around 1 billion of Earth-sized habitable planets in our Milky Way alone right now and there are many others to be born all over the universe. The vast part of human habitable worlds will appear in the millions or billions years to come, according to the new theoretical models. Researchers collected their information from NASA’s telescopes and the Kepler Observatory, determining that when the solar system formed more than 4.5 billion years ago, only 8% of the worlds able of sheltering life were developed across the universe. This indicates that 92% of the space’s possibly livable planets are now just gas and stardust. The scientists added that human friendly worlds would still be developing long after the sun dies in around 6.5 billion years.
The universe still has plenty of matter and energy remaining after the formation of past and current celestial objects to generate even more worlds later on, both in our galaxy and beyond it. According to astronomers, an advantage of our rather young Earth is that it survived many turbulent eras that happened in the Milky Way. Hubble let scientists to track our space trip from the initial big bang to the birth of the galaxy, which created their analysis.
Based on this research, the specialists estimated that there are more than 1 billion planets in our Milky Way right now, but a substantial number of them are believed to be plain rocky worlds. This number grows exponentially when all other billions of galaxies found in the visible universe are added to these mathematical equations. The study’s view on the future of the planets is also worth noticing, since most astronomers usually avoid discovering what their findings mean for the evolution of these galaxies. They stop right before widening their research area beyond what can be evaluated for previous and present times.
It is exciting to look into our future, just as it is when we study our past, since you can learn a lot from these anterior changes. The research indicates that there is a variety of factors for more Earth-like worlds in habitable areas to form in the billions of years to come. And the future of the universe is an extremely long one: the last stars are predicted to die in around 100 trillion years. Until then, all we can do is launch various theories about what is yet to come on us and our own small planet.
Image source: Hawaii.edu