Researchers at the University of Colorado believe that earth-like planets may be common, the reason why we haven’t found any earth-like planets yet are due to the way we look for planets. All planets so far are huge gas giants like Jupiter.

Which orbit extremely close to their parent stars, even closer than Mercury to our sun. The close-orbiting gassy planets may help encourage the formations of smaller, rocky, Earth-like planets.

The team from Colorado, Penn State University and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Centre Maryland ran computer simulations of various types of solar systems forming.

They found that the gas giants may help rocky planets form close to the suns, and may help pull in icy bodies that deliver water to the young planets.

Lead researcher Sean Raymond, of the University of Colorado said:

"These gas giants cause quite a ruckus. I think there are definitely habitable planets out there. But any life on these planets could be very different from ours.

There are a lot of evolutionary steps in between the formation of such planets in other systems and the presence of life forms looking back at us."

As many as 40 per cent of the 200 or so known planets around other stars are Hot Jupiters, the researchers said.