If we're to find extraterrestrial life in the universe, astronomers have pinpointed the best places to look for it.
They have identified just under 50 rocky worlds most likely to be habitable out of the more than 6,000 exoplanets discovered so far.
Their research, published today in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, would be useful in a scenario portrayed in the newly-released Hollywood blockbuster Project Hail Mary, which sees Ryan Gosling's character having to travel to an exoplanet system in search of a way to save Earth.
On the way he encounters an alien lifeform named Rocky and the fictional extraterrestrial micro-organisms Astrophage and Taumoeba.
Professor Lisa Kaltenegger, director of the Carl Sagan Institute at Cornell University, and a team of undergraduate students used new data from the European Space Agency's Gaia mission and the NASA Exoplanet Archive to identify planets in the so-called habitable zone.
This is an area not too close to a host star that it’s too hot, and not too far away that it’s too cold. lt also means that, like Earth, a planet is much more likely to have water on its surface – which is a key ingredient for life.
The paper, titled 'Probing the limits of habitability: a catalogue of rocky exoplanets in the habitable zone', also shortlisted the worlds that receive the most similar energy from their star compared to what Earth gets from our Sun.
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