'100 percent' chance for life on newly found planet?

"Our findings offer a very compelling case for a potentially habitable planet," said Steven Vogt, an astronomer at UCSC.

"The fact that we were able to detect this planet so quickly and so nearby tells us that planets like this must be really common."

"We're at exactly that threshold now with finding habitable planets," said Paul Butler of the Carnegie Institution, a co-author of the study.

Dr Vogt agreed: "The number of systems with potentially habitable planets is probably on the order of 10 or 20%, and when you multiply that by the hundreds of billions of stars in the Milky Way, that's a large number," he said.

"There could be tens of billions of these systems in our galaxy."

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'100 percent' chance for life on newly found planet?

"The chances for life on this planet are 100 percent," Steven Vogt, a UC professor of astronomy and astrophysics says. "I have almost no doubt about it."

Dr. Elizabeth Cunningham, planetarium astronomer at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, says the discovery is a huge deal.

Astronomers are excited this new planet was discovered so fast and relatively close by.

"I'm surprised we found one so fast," Cunningham said. "The implication is either we were very lucky or these planets could be relatively common."

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The Big Bang was a seed, and the cosmos is a living organism