Greg Redfern, wtop.com Back in September, I wrote in my blog how
I thought that there had to be billions if not trillions of
planets in the universe. Well, a new study by astronomers at the
California Institute of Technology has determined that our very
own Milky Way Galaxy has at least 100 BILLION planets, or to put
it another way, one planet per star. That is a lot of planets!
As I said in my blog, planets seem to be a natural byproduct of
stellar formation and we are finding planets outside of our
solar system, or exoplanets, everywhere we look. We now know of
a planetary system around the nearest star system to us located
4 light years away, of a planet that is made of diamond, big
Jupiter-sized and bigger planets, and near-Earth sized planets.
In short, our Milky Way Galaxy is a veritable zoo of planets -
each distinct and incredible. And if our galaxy has at least one
planet per star, so too should the 100 billion+ galaxies that
comprise our observable Universe. Wow, what a number of worlds
that is. We