14 DAY TRIAL // NASA has recently released this artist's illustration to showcase just how many planets are believed to exist within our galaxy. According to the latest estimate, more than 100 billion alien worlds revolve in orbit around stars in the Milky Way.
A paper detailing the investigation appears in the January 12 issue of the top scientific journal Nature.
In this rendition, the distance between stars has been reduced significantly, so the view is not to scale. One of the most important conclusions in the new study is that stars in a 50-light-year radius from the Sun are likely to hold a combined total of 1,500 planets.
To get a sense of scale, the Milky Way is believed to be around 120,000 light-years across. The planetary number estimate comes from a 6-year study of the night sky, conducted by the PLANET (Probing Lensing Anomalies NETwork) collaboration.