Is Earth the only planet with life in the universe? That question has haunted humanity for generations—being asked in every forum from the ancient philosophers to modern science. Now, thanks to the Keplar telescope, astronomers may be a step closer to solving that question by answering a side question: how many potentially habitable planets are out there? The answer is more than you think.

“When you look up at the stars in the night sky, how many of them have a planet like the Earth?” asked Erik Petigura, a graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley and the lead author of the paper. “We’re able to start answering this question.”

According to a new analysis published on Monday of observations made by NASA’s Keplar space telescope, a possibly habitable, Earth-size planet orbits roughly one in every five sunlike stars. For example, our own solar system the Milky Way alone could have tens of billions of liquid-water-carrying planets.

“Earth-sized planets having the temperature of a cup of tea are common around sunlike stars,” said planet hunter Geoff Marcy, a Berkeley astronomer and a co-author of the study. He said the finding “represents one great leap toward the possibility of life, including intelligent life, in the universe.”

If the estimates are correct, the nearest ocean-carrying planet is 12 light-years away, essentially our planet’s neighbor (though don’t expect a robot mission anytime in the near future).

Kepler was launched in 2009 originally to figure out about how many stars had habitable planets orbiting them. Since its launch, Kepler has studied 15,000 stars inside the constellation Cygnus. Kepler is no longer able to view planets outside our solar system due to a steering system failure earlier this year. However, it still has added more than three years of data to the system, and scientists have another year of going through it all.

Keplar did not look specifically for the planets as they are too dim and shadowed behind much brighter objects in the sky.

Instead, Kepler searched for the periodic dimming of the stars, which would indicate the orbiting planets. This latest analysis that came from these observations means the near completion of the astronomers’ goal, but there’s still more data analysis needed.

For example, Earth-size does not necessarily mean Earth-like, according to MIT astrophysicist Sara Seager. She added that the results from this latest set of observations from Kepler would help efforts to build new telescopes that could obtain detailed imagery of one of those neighbor planets.