10. The Kepler Mission

The Kepler Space Telescope was launched in 2009 in order to discover earth-like planets in the galaxy. Since then, it has found around 1200 similar planets. Using this data, scientists conclude that there are around 40 billion potential rocky bodies similar to earth, 11 billion of them orbiting sun-like stars. In 2015, NASA announced that 4 of the planets they’d found orbited their stars in habitable zones. How cool!