Based on Kepler Telescope observations and computer-generated replications, scientists have concluded that the Milky Way Galaxy likely has billions of stars with planets in their respective "habitable zones."

According to Discovery News, the habitable zone is a given distance at which a planet must orbit its star to have conditions favorable for liquid water and, potentially, life. The international team of scientists based their findings on 151 planetary systems previously spotted by NASA's Kepler Telescope.

Most systems had at least one habitable zone planet, though some had multiple. The researchers, whose study is published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, used the Kepler data to create further-reaching computer simulations.

"We decided to use this method to calculate the potential planetary positions in 151 planetary systems, where the Kepler satellite had found between 3 and 6 planets. In 124 of the planetary systems, the Titius-Bode law fit with the position of the planets. Using T-B's law we tried to predict where there could be more planets further out in the planetary systems. But we only made calculations for planets where there is a good chance that you can see them with the Kepler satellite," Steffen Kjær Jacobsen, a PhD student at the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen, said in a press release. "We then made a priority list with 77 planets in 40 planetary systems to focus on because they have a high probability of making a transit, so you can see them with Kepler. We have encouraged other researchers to look for these. If they are found, it is an indication that the theory stands up.

"In these 31 planetary systems that were close to the habitable zone, our calculations showed that there was an average of two planets in the habitable zone. According to the statistics and the indications we have, a good share of the planets in the habitable zone will be solid planets where there might be liquid water and where life could exist."