How many planets are there in our galaxy?

Taken together, the stars observed by Kepler make up about 70% of those found within the Milky Way. So one can estimate that there are literally tens of billions of potentially habitable planets in our galaxy alone. read more

But the most important thing to take away is not that we can take the number of candidate planets for rocky worlds in the habitable zones, say “this is out of 150,000 stars,” and scale that to the ~400 billion stars in our galaxy. read more

The survey results show that our galaxy contains, on average, a minimum of one planet for every star. This means that it's likely there is a minimum of 1,500 planets within just 50 light-years of Earth. read more