Is Earth Unique?

The name of Earth's galaxy is called the Milky Way. There are billions and billions of stars in the Milky Way, including our Sun, which is also a star.

In a New York Time article, Eric Petigura is a graduate student at University of California at Berkley. He also is a astronomer who is involved with NASA's Kepler mission.

Kepler is a telescope based in space that was launched by NASA on March 2009. The areas Kepler is watching is home to 10,000 stars like our Sun.

Eric discovered a hella lot of earth-like planets circling around their stars. In the article, Eric claimed that planets, in order to have life, have to be at the perfect distance from its star in order to have liquid water, which enables life.

Eric's findings are credible because many other scientists have reviewed his work and many expert scientists found his work to be credible. One such scientist, Sara Seager, was quoted as saying Eric's research was rigorous and believable.

Eric designed a computer program that can detect fake planets. Eric setup an experiment that can see if a planet is real or fake, and the program was able to detect the fake planets.

An exoplanet is an earth-like planet outside of our solar system. Scientists are able to detect distant exoplanets using telescopes. Though scientists are unable to literally see these exoplanets, they cause a drop in brightness when passing their star.