Life throughout the Universe

This picture shows the stars in just one small part of our Milky Way galaxy that we can see from Earth. Each of these stars is a sun.

Every star in every one of the billions of galaxies that you learned about on page 8 is a sun, and lots of them are orbited by planets.

The molecules that make up those planets and the chemical reactions that can happen are just like those on Earth.

The factors that made life happen on Earth have almost certainly happened on planets throughout the Universe.

Even if the right combination of factors is as rare as one in a hundred billion, and there is only one planet that has life on it in each galaxy, that would still mean there are 100 billion planets with some sort of life.

We just don’t know what kind of life might be on those planets, or how to reach them. Not yet.

Image credits for this page:
Summer Milky Way: Utah Skies
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