I knew it.. I knew it... I knew it....

Here we go. I wonder what the People are going to say when we finally do find life.

Here is a link and I pasted the whole story just in case the link goes dead.

Billions of Planets in the Milky Way Galaxy

The Hubble Space Telescope has discovered a trove of fast-moving "candidate" planets in a narrow region near the very center of the Milky Way, and astronomers say there must be billions more of them -- including many like Earth that orbit their suns in so-called "habitable" zones.

The flying observatory's powerful eyes have peered through thousands of light-years of cosmic dust and distant constellations to pinpoint 16 objects about the size of Jupiter circling stars, scientists announced Wednesday. They have gathered enough information to determine that at least seven are probably true planets, and the orbits and masses of two already have been confirmed by ground-based telescopes, they said.

But Kailash Sahu, a lead astronomer at the Space Telescope Institute in Baltimore, said the Hubble has surveyed only a small, tight fraction of the Milky Way in the galaxy's central bulge some 26,000 light-years away. "Our discovery gives very strong evidence that planets are as abundant in other parts of the galaxy as they are in our own solar neighborhood," he said.

In fact, said astrophysicist Mario Livio of the institute, at least 6 billion Jupiter-size planets are probably circling stars throughout the entire galaxy. "You can infer, but not yet prove, that among them are many rocky Earth-like planets," he said. "Eventually, we hope to find life -- and possibly intelligence there."

The Hubble mission was not designed to detect any such planets. That search will call for far different instruments aboard future spacecraft. The planets would have to be roughly the size of Earth and lie in habitable zones. Although not necessarily inhabited, they would be just the right distance from their suns where liquid water could exist on a planet's surface.

The two scientists, who head a large international team, reported the new findings from the Hubble today in the journal Nature. They described the results Wednesday at a NASA press conference in Washington that was carried on the Web.

Funded by NASA, the Hubble has been flying in low Earth orbit since 1990, and scientists hope it can continue exploring the galaxy until 2010, a goal that will be reached only if the space agency sends a shuttle crew to update the telescope's instruments. The Hubble's missions are managed by the telescope institute, which is part of Johns Hopkins University.

The planet-hunting mission surveyed 180,000 stars and detected each planet as it passed in orbit across the face of its star and dimmed the star's light by a tiny increment, just enough to be spotted and measured by the Hubble's sensitive instruments.

Each passage is called a transit, and it took many days of measuring each transit for the scientists to decide on the seven candidates that are almost surely true planets. Only two of the candidates, so far, have been identified with certainty by ground-based telescopes that measured the slight wobble their transits caused in their suns. The rest remain on the probable list, Sahu and Livio said.

All the planets are gas giants and are truly bizarre because their orbits carry them extremely close to their suns -- so close, in fact, that five of them zip around their suns in less than a day -- and one, only 740,000 miles from its star, orbits in only 10 hours, the astronomers said. That planet's temperature appears to be about 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit, Livio said, so, it must be extremely massive or its sun's gravity would tear it apart because it's so near, he said.

The suns are less bizarre, although some are less than half the size of the sun in our own solar system, while others are slightly larger. All are rich in heavy elements like iron and carbon, Livio said, which means they are likely to contain the ingredients needed to form planets.

"There's now a high probability that Earths will be relatively common in the galaxy," said Alan Boss, an astrophysicist at the Carnegie Institution in Washington who was not on the Hubble team. "We're really getting the feeling that there will be habitable planets among them -- but not necessarily inhabited."

Boss is on the science team now readying a NASA spacecraft named Kepler that is scheduled for launch in 2008 and is designed to detect hundreds of Earth-size planets in our own region of the Milky Way. Some of those planets, Boss and his colleagues reason, might well lie in or near the habitable zones of their solar systems.

E-mail David Perlman at dperlman@sfchronicle.com