Dubbed the most extensive planetary census of its kind, the NASA-funded study at the University of California, Berkeley found that smaller planets rather than massive ones are prevalent in close orbit to the stars.
"The data tell us that our galaxy, with its roughly 200 billion stars, has at least 46 billion Earth-size planets, and that's not counting Earth-size planets that orbit farther away from their stars in the habitable zone," said study co-author Geoff Marcy.
The astronomers for five years used the W.
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M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii to search 166 sun-like stars near our solar system for planets ranging from three to 1,000 times the mass of Earth.
The results showed more small planets than large ones.
"We studied planets of many masses -- like counting boulders, rocks and pebbles in a canyon -- and found more rocks than boulders, and more pebbles than rocks," said UC Berkeley's Andrew Howard, lead author of the study that will be published in Friday's issue of the journal Science.