Astronomers: Planets outnumber stars

WASHINGTON -- The more astronomers look for other worlds, the more they find that it is a crowded and crazy cosmos. They think planets easily outnumber stars in our galaxy, and they are even finding them in the strangest of places.

And they have only begun to count.

Three studies released Wednesday, in the journal Nature and at the American Astronomical Society's conference in Austin, Texas, demonstrate an extrasolar real estate boom. One study shows that in our Milky Way, most stars have planets. And since there are about 100 billion stars in our galaxy, that means a lot of planets.

"We're finding . . . things we didn't even think could exist," said Harvard University astronomer Lisa Kaltenegger, including planets with twin suns, and a mini-star system with a dwarf sun and shrunken planets.

Confirmed planets outside our solar system -- called exoplanets -- now number well over 700; still-to-be-confirmed ones are in the thousands.

NASA's new Kepler planet-hunting telescope in space is discovering exoplanets that are in a zone friendly to life and detecting planets as small as Earth or even tinier. That is moving the field of looking for life outside Earth from science fiction toward plain science. -- AP