(Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)
A memorable milestone has been reached in the history of our knowledge of the universe, with the 1000th exoplanet being discovered just over 2 decades after first spotting exoplanets orbiting a star other than our own sun.
“The discovery of many worlds around other stars is a great achievement of science and technology. The work of scientists and engineers from many countries were necessary to achieve this difficult milestone,” says Abel Mendez Torres, of the University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo’s Planetary Habitability Laboratory.
However this is only the beginning of our search for exoplanets and planets that could potentially hold life, as according to the numbers in a study published in 2012, every star in the Milky Way on average is home to 1.6 orbiting planets, equalling 160 billion alien worlds just in our own galaxy.
Amazing right? You can see the entire article here at Live Science for more details.
