We had a Hand in it...but Mostly it was Erik's: Using NERSC Supercomputers to Find Habitable Zone, Terrestrial Exoplanets

One out of every five sun-like stars in our Milky Way galaxy has an Earth-sized planet orbiting it in the Goldilocks zone—not too hot, not too cold—where surface temperatures should be compatible with liquid water, according to a statistical analysis of data from NASA’s Kepler spacecraft by Erik Petigura, a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley).

Petigura and his colleague Andrew Howard, now at the University of Hawaii, Manoa, spent three years developing a transit search pipeline called TERRA that is optimized for finding small planets. When they used this tool on supercomputers at the Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) to analyze nearly four years of Kepler observations, the scientists determined that our galaxy could contain as many as 40 billion habitable Earth-sized planets.

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