An American astronomer told scientists gathered for the annual American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting on Saturday that she has a short list of stars that are most likely to have planets containing life.
Margaret Turnbull of the Carnegie Institution in Washington singled out eleven "habitable stellar systems" out of the estimated 400 billion stars in our galaxy. Five of them are most likely to garner results for those searching for radio signals from intelligent civilizations and six are most likely to reward astronomers trying to actually see an earth-like planet.
Turnbull said she limited her selection to stars most like our own Sun, using criteria such as how old the star is and how much iron content it has.
She said, "These are places I'd want to live if God were to put our planet around another star."
Some information for this report was provided by Reuters.