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All life as we know it in the entire universe is tucked away on a tiny rock floating in a tiny branch of the Milky Way galaxy. There are billions of other planets that could potentially support life. But how does our location affect our chances of finding it?
So far, the search for life elsewhere has only scratched the surface. “The bubble of space we’ve been able to explore around the Sun is tiny compared to the size of our galaxy,” he said. Jesse Christiansen“But we’ve already discovered more than 5,000 planets, called exoplanets, that orbit other stars,” says John F. Kennedy, an astrophysicist at the California Institute of Technology. Some of these have been found throughout our galaxy and even in other galaxies, but most are within a few hundred light years of the sun, a stone’s throw in the scheme of the universe.
Our Galactic Neighborhood
Astronomers are beginning to look at the different types of stars in the galaxy’s outskirts and how they affect the habitability of planets around us. We live in an arm of the Milky Way called Orion, which is inside the main plane of the galaxy called the thin disk. We are surrounded by stars in the Orion arm. Further outwards, there is a dense central bulge of the galaxy, and the other arm is surrounded by the sparse outer parts of the other arms of the galaxy.
Thin, disk-shaped stars, like our Sun and other stars in the constellation Orion, generally…
