A team led by researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, said many exoplanets located around these stars könnte Earth could see planets as small as Mars in their own solar systems.
"With next-generation ground-based telescopes and current and upcoming space-based telescopes, we could detect signs of life on exoplanets orbiting some of these same stars," said scientist Stephen Kane.
The team said that 295 of the potentially Earth-observing stars are red dwarfs -- small and faint and relatively numerous in the Milky Way.
Red dwarfs are common targets in the search for exoplanets, the researchers said.
Their proximity and brightness increase the likelihood of detecting transiting exoplanets -- those few exoplanets that are aligned so that they pass in front of their parent stars from our vantage point on Earth.
The team also reported 704 white dwarf stars that are hot remnants of dead stars that could potentially spot Earth.
And about 1,234 main sequence -- hydrogen-fusing -- stars that could see life on Earth if they have planets circling them.
About 172 of the nearest red dwarfs are expected to be observed by an upcoming NASA space telescope called the James Webb Space Telescope, the researchers said.
The team calculated which stars have a line of sight to Earth and have stable enough orbits for their planets to remain within the habitable zone -- the region around the star where surface water could exist -- for several billion years.
The search for exoplanets has intensified over the past two decades, as NASA and other space agencies, as well as groups like the SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence), have launched missions and built telescopes to try to spot distant planets.
Last week, NASA announced that its Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) had found three confirmed planets and dozens more potential planets orbiting distant stars.
TESS, launched in 2018, is designed to find exoplanets using the transit method.
The researchers in the current study used data from NASA's Gaia space observatory, which is surveying more than a billion stars in the Milky Way, to identify potentially habitable exoplanets and nearby stars that could harbour those planets.
"While we don't know whether intelligent civilisations exist around other stars, given the proliferation of planets in the Milky Way and beyond, it seems likely that Earth is not the only planet that harbours life," Kane said.
