Long wistful for just such a find, I eagerly queried my astronomical friends in California by e-mail. By January 1996 that group had twice lengthened the planet tally. Now we can point to three sunlike stars that shine upon giant planets, as does our sun. All are on the lists of the few hundred candidate stars in our galactic neighborhood, rather freely dubbed sunlike. Observers have been searching these for indirect signs of planets.
Groups are hard at work in several countries.
Once I filled in the implications, tilting only a little toward optimism, I stood breathless. Star counts of the Milky Way offer quite adequate reason to set the total number of long-lived, stable, sunlike stars at a few percent of the entire star population of this galaxy's disk. I estimate that easily a billion stars in our own galaxy resemble Sol. Our own experience as planet dwellers allows a direct answer. In your sky after dusk this spring, an exceptional evening star blazes forth.