As Captain Kirk and his crew explore the Milky Way (and far, far beyond) they regularly encountering alien life. Often these life forms resemble humans, and frequently they have developed into civilizations far more advanced than those seen on Earth.
Star Trek – I hate to break it to you – is a work of fiction. But while screenwriters have been sending the Starship Enterprise on its voyages to the final frontier, astronomers here on Earth have also been searching for alien worlds. They have been using telescopes to hunt for exoplanets and for signs that life could exist on them, such as whether these planets resemble Earth and whether they orbit within a habitable distance away from their parent stars.
Yesterday, astronomers announced a discovery that could give second-Earth-hunters a reason to be optimistic. Results from the European Southern Observatory’s High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS) instrument revealed that our galaxy could be awash with rocky super-Earths orbiting within the habitable zones around faint red stars. The international team of researchers claims that there may be tens of billions of such planets in the Milky Way alone, and probably about 100 in the Sun’s immediate neighbourhood.
It's probably much more common than is widely believed. To read more, click here.