Astronomers Pinpoint the Best 45 Places in the Galaxy to Look For Alien Life

In humanity’s search for life beyond Earth, astronomers have identified more than 6,000 planets that lie outside the solar system. From that long list of worlds of different shapes and sizes, a team of researchers has come up with a list of potential candidates most likely to host alien life. A new study published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society lists 45 rocky worlds that orbit within a habitable zone, making them more likely to have an essential ingredient for life—water. The list includes some well-known exoplanets such as Proxima Centauri b, TRAPPIST-1f, and Kepler 186f, as well as less popular candidates such as TOI-715 b. The purpose of the research is to guide astronomers in search of habitability outside the solar system. “While it’s hard to say what makes something more likely to have life, identifying where to look is the first key step—so the goal of our project was to say ‘here are the best targets for observation’,” Gillis Lowry, a graduate student at San Francisco State University, and co-author of the study, said in a statement. Astronomers only know of one place in the universe that hosts life—Earth. And so the guidelines for searching for habita