A planet for every star - Light Years Blogs
Researchers have concluded that each star in the Milky Way galaxy likely has at least one planet orbiting it, meaning that our galaxy has at least 100 billion planets to its name.
Given that it’s news every time Kepler discovers a new exoplanet (a planet orbiting a star other than our sun), how did astronomers come to this conclusion?
Using a technique called microlensing, and statistical analysis applied to six years’ worth of observations from the PLANET (Probing Lensing Anomalies NETwork), MOA (Microlensing Observations in Astrophysics) and OGLE (Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment) surveys, researchers were able to determine that statistically speaking, every star in the Milky Way should have at least one orbiting planet, if not more. Moreover, these planets are likelier to have low masses, similar to Earth, than Jupiter-like masses.
