The astronomer insists we would be “conceited” to think humans are the only intelligent life in the universe.

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Dr Aderin-Pocock, who presents BBC’s The Sky At Night, told the Dish podcast that the sheer size of the universe means there must be extraterrestrial life out there.

The 55-year-old said: “I get asked ‘are aliens out there?’ and I would say yes, almost definitely.

“There are 300 billion stars in our galaxy, the Milky Way.

“Each one of those is a sun like ours and now, in the last ten years, we’ve been detecting exoplanets orbiting those stars.

“Because even the closest star is 40 trillion kilometres away, we need really big telescopes to see the planets.

“But we’ve detected about 5,000 so far.

“And the more we look, the more we see, so it seems that most stars out there have planets going round them.

“So let’s say our galaxy’s 300 billion stars have on average two planets each.

“And in the whole universe there are 200 billion galaxies.

“I think we’d be conceited to think we’re alone.

“The more we look, the more insignificant we realise we are.”