Question: How many solar systems are there?

Jess Wade answered on 22 Jun 2015:

Hey LittleB213,

We call it the solar system because we have one bright star at the middle (the sun) and the other planets (mars, earth, venus, saturn, jupiter, uranus and neptune) all orbit around it. The sun is just one of 300 billion stars (300,000,000,000) in the Milky Way. It’s actually really hard to see planets because the stars are so bright, so we can’t see which other stars have planets orbiting them. We have to use special telescopes that look at the low energy light that doesn’t come from planets.

So far, we think we’ve found about 500 different solar systems with planets orbiting stars like our own, and we’re finding new ones each year!