In astronomical news that may surprise (or may not) some hardcore fundamentalist and flat-earthers, new evidence from the scientific community, that have spent decades gazing into the night skies and from the finders of uncounted new stars, solar systems and, just this year alone, 28 new planets orbiting other stars, the finding is our planet Earth is far from unique and our solar system is quite common.

This has led to the conclusion that there may be billions of habitable planets throughout the universe, at least the parts of it we have investigated.

The current number of known exoplanets, planets outside our solar system, is 236, the researchers told a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Honolulu on Monday.

“We are beginning to see that our home is not a rarity in the universe,” said Geoffrey Marcy, a professor of astronomy at the University of California Berkeley.

“We are easily able to detect giant planets like Jupiter and Saturn around other stars. Most orbit far from the star like our own Jupiter and Saturn orbit from the sun,” Marcy said in a Reuters telephone interview.

“It’s a common structure among planetary systems.”

Our solar system is unique in one way not yet seen in other systems, at least to date, — the near perfect circular orbits of the planets around our Sun. This has not been the case with the other systems researched so far.

“Most of the planets are not in circular orbits around the host star but in elongated ones called elliptical orbits,” Marcy said.

“We enjoy nearly constant temperatures throughout the year,” he added. “If the Earth got too close to the Sun, the Earth would heat up, the water would boil off and that would be bad.” Too far, and it would freeze.

“An elongated orbit could not sustain life,” Marcy said.

Details of the the groups findings can be found at Exoplanets.org.

“We are finding that most stars have not just one planet but when we find one there is a second or a third or a fourth,” Marcy said.

“The attribute which really has us the most excited is this new planet which we found three years ago,” Marcy said. The Neptune-like planet orbiting the star Gliese 436 has intrigued scientists because it appears to be covered with water — albeit rock-hard, hot water in a most un-Earthlike chemical state because of the intense pressures on the planet.

“From the density of two grams per cubic centimeter — twice that of water — it must be 50 percent rock and about 50 percent water, with perhaps small amounts of hydrogen and helium,” Marcy said.

“Now we are very sure it has a rocky core and this giant thick envelope of water,” he added.

“This is why we are jumping out of our clothes. It is the first time we have determined the structure of one of these extrasolar planets. It is rocky like Earth but it has a lot of water which is the essential ingredient for life.”

“Our Milky Way galaxy has 200 billion stars. I would estimate that 10 percent of them, perhaps, have planets that are habitable,” Marcy said.

“There are hundreds of billions of galaxies, all of which are more or less like our Milky Way Galaxy, which is tens of billions of planets like our own.”

With those kinds of numbers and odds the possiblities for intelligent life somewhere out there in our vast universe are, pardon the pun, astronomical!