Dr Alan Boss of the Carnegie Institution of Science said many of these worlds could be inhabited by simple lifeforms.
He was speaking at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Chicago.
So far, telescopes have been able to detect just over 300 planets outside our Solar System.
Very few of these would be capable of supporting life, however. Most are gas giants like our Jupiter; and many orbit so close to their parent stars that any microbes would have to survive roasting temperatures.
But, based on the limited numbers of planets found so far, Dr Boss has estimated that each Sun-like star has on average one “Earth-like” planet.
This simple calculation means there would be huge numbers capable of supporting life.
“Not only are they probably habitable but they probably are also going to be inhabited,” Dr Boss told BBC News. “But I think that most likely the nearby ‘Earths’ are going to be inhabited with things which are perhaps more common to what Earth was like three or four billion years ago.” That means bacterial lifeforms.
Dr Boss estimates that Nasa’s Kepler mission, due for launch in March, should begin finding some of these Earth-like planets within the next few years.
Recent work at Edinburgh University tried to quantify how many intelligent civilisations might be out there. The research suggested there could be thousands of them.
A few days ago, a mysterious cloud shaped like a halo appeared over Moscow, and the buzz has yet to break.
We’re the first to admit that a photograph of the heavenly cloud appears to be photoshopped. It’s just so…perfect. But meterologists have spoken up and said the cloud wasn’t digitally altered. However, it wasn’t exactly what it appeared to be, either.
When the cloud initially formed, some UFO enthusiasts declared it to be a “true mystery.” Some even compared it to the giant spaceship hovering over Earth in the movie “Independence Day.” Reality quickly dashed any predictions of an alien invasion. An article from the Daily Mail explains that the “luminous ring-shaped cloud” was simply an optical effect.
An official spokesperson for Moscow’s weather department said, “Several fronts have been passing through Moscow recently, there was an intrusion of the Arctic air too, the sun was shining from the west — this is how the effect was produced.”
The cloud loomed last week, but the searches are still soaring. Lookups on “halo cloud” and “moscow cloud” are both booming, and a video clip has garnered hundreds of thousands of views
A five-centimeter fir tree has been found in the lung of a man who complained he had a strong pain in his chest and was coughing blood.
The 28-year-old patient, Artyom Sidorkin, came to a hospital in the city of Izhevsk in Central Russia last week, Komsomolskaya Pravda daily reports.
Doctors x-rayed his chest and found a tumor in one of the lungs. Suspecting cancer, they made a decision to perform biopsy, but when they cut the tissue, they were amazed to see green needles in the cut.
“I blinked three times, and thought I was seeing things. Then I called the assistant to have a look,” says Vladimir Kamashev, doctor at the Udmurtian Cancer Center.
The five-centimeter branch was removed from the patient’s body.
“They told me my coughing blood was not caused by any disease,” Sidorkin says.
“It was the needles poking the capillaries. It really hurt a lot. But I never felt like I had an alien object inside of me.”
It is obvious that a five-centimeter branch is too large to be inhaled or swallowed, doctors say. They suggest that the patient might have inhaled a small bud, which then started to grow inside his body.
Meanwhile, the piece of lung with the little fir tree has been preserved for further study.
Dr Alan Boss of the Carnegie Institution of Science said many of these worlds could be inhabited by simple lifeforms.
A few days ago, a mysterious cloud shaped like a halo appeared over Moscow, and the buzz has yet to break.
