Is there life outside of earth? By looking at pictures such as these, it's getting increasingly harder to think otherwise. Some astronomers have picked candidate stars that they believe most likely harbor life.
US astronomers have come up with a short list of five stars in the Milky Way galaxy that are most likely to support extraterrestrial life.
But they have narrowed their choices to stars that likely harbor life as we know it.
The stars were chosen based on a number of criteria, including size, composition, age and color, that would make them similar to the sun and enable planets resembling Earth to orbit them, said Margaret Turnbull of the Carnegie Institution of Washington.
Of course, there may be other forms of life out there that do not resemble anything like that with which we are familiar, meaning that most stars could harbor some form of life. But one can hardly blame astronomers for narrowing their choices by only looking at sun-like stars.