According to a new study, there could be around 100 'super earths' within 30 light years of us.
Seems that lots of red dwarfs have rocky planets of 1-10 times the mass of the Earth orbiting in their habitable zones. And about 80 percent of the stars in our galaxy are red dwarves, so that makes billions of such planets in this galaxy.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/spac ... y-Way.htmlQuote:
Dr Xavier Bonfils, from Grenoble University in France, who led the international team, said: ''Because red dwarfs are so common - there are about 160 billion of them in the Milky Way - this leads us to the astonishing result that there are tens of billions of these planets in our galaxy alone.''