Billions of Earth-like planets in the sky around us

Photo from NASA

The Atlantic Wire reports that

there are about 20 billion Sun-like stars in the Milky Way. That adds up to potentially tens of billions of Earth-like planets in the sky around us. And if the sample is representative of the rest of the galaxy, the closest Earth-like world could be fewer than 12 light-years away from us. That's pretty darn close, in interstellar terms.