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8 of the most compelling places we could discover alien life outside our solar system

Ali SundermierMay 19, 2016, 21:31 IST

NASA/Ames/JPL-Caltech

On May 10, NASA added 1,284 new planets to its running list of confirmed planets outside of our solar system, or exoplanets. That brings the total well above 3,000.

And those are just the ones we've detected. Scientists now believe that, on average, every star in the Milky Way has at least one planet orbiting it.

And there are more than 100 billion stars in our galaxy alone.

With numbers like those, its hard to believe that we're all alone.

Exploring these exoplanets is our best bet to locate distant neighbors in our lonely chunk of the universe.

Here are some of the most promising places we might find life beyond our solar system: