NASA / MCT / Getty Images
Unless you're some kind of space nut, you're probably entirely unaware that the Milky Way, our home galaxy, isn't traveling through the cosmos alone. It's being shadowed by a litter of nearly a dozen dwarf galaxies that are far smaller and dimmer — a pack of cubs, you might say, yapping around the edges of the Mama Grizzly. If you widen your gaze to include a much larger swath of space, you'll find what's called the Local Group — a half-dozen full-size galaxies and about 30 dwarfs./.../
160 billion planets in the Milky Way?!
M. Kornmesser / ESO
A cartoon view of the Milky Way shows stars bristling with planets. The planets, their orbits and the sizes of their host stars are all vastly magnified in the cartoon.
A statistical analysis based on a survey of millions of stars suggests that there's at least one planet for every star in the sky, and probably more. That would add up to 160 billion planets or so in the Milky Way.
"We conclude that stars are orbited by planets as a rule, rather than the exception," an international research team reports today in the journalNature./.../
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