Hopes Rise Of Chance Of Life Outside Earth
The chances of life existing outside the Earth have been boosted by the discovery that there might be many more stars in the universe than first thought. Astronomers have learned that small, dim stars known as red dwarfs are far more prolific than they believed - up to three times as much. Using powerful instruments at the Keck Observatory in Hawaii, they detected faint light from red dwarfs in eight massive "elliptical galaxies" between 50 million and 300 million light years away. Their findings show about 20 times more of the stars in the galaxies than in our own Milky Way. There are already estimated to be 10 to the power of 21 - or 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 - stars in the expanding observable universe, or that portion of the cosmos it is possible for us to see given the speed of light... Sky / Yahoo