Thousands of years of astronomy spent wondering about potentially habitable planets in the universe and then 64 billion come along at once. The discovery of new planets has in recent years become commonplace but most have been spotted by looking at changes in the light of their bright stars. Now we have a view into the smaller, darker red dwarfs that make up 80% of stars in our galaxy. The HARPS team peered at a representative sample of stars estimating that 40% of the 160 billion red dwarfs in our galaxy has a super-Earth circling in the Goldilocks or habitable zone. That's where the temperature is just right for liquid water. Astronomers are getting better at spotting smaller planets close to Earth's size and it seems that everywhere they look and in every way they look, planets abound. There's still a long way to go to determine whether any of them has conditions suitable for life and a long way again to search for life itself. But with billions of kitchens in which the ingredients of life might come together, it's ever more difficult to doubt that the recipe has been tried elsewhere.


几千年来，天文学家们一直在寻找宇宙中潜在的适合人类居住的星球，突然一下子发现了640亿个。 近些年来，新的星球的发现已经是常事，其中大多数也是通过其亮度的变化而发现的。现在我们来谈谈那些占银行系80%以上的体积较小颜色较深的红矮星。 HARPS 研究小组通过对一组代表性的星球进行观察发现，银河系中1600亿个红矮星中约有40%在超地球的轨道上运行，这个距离上的温度正好适宜液态水的存在。 天文学家们发现了越来越多的接近地球大小的星球，而且无论他们观察哪里以何种方式观察，他们都能发现。但是想要确定这些星球上是否有适宜生命存在的条件或是在上面寻找生命，还有一大段路要走。