Researchers have discovered the most similar planet yet to Earth, 1,400 light-years away.
Kepler 452b orbits its star in 385 days, just 20 days longer than our own year.
Its star is just 4% larger, a billion and a half years older, and 20% brighter than
the sun, meaning 452b is firmly in the “goldilocks” habitable zone that puts the odds of it being
rocky, like Earth, between 50-62%.
Scientist Jeff Coughlin says “this is the first possibly rocky, habitable planet around
a solar-type star.”
All 11 previously discovered exoplanets of similar size and orbit circle smaller, cooler
stars.
The planet was found by the Kepler telescope, which searches for possible Earth-twins by
observing periodic dips in the brightness of stars as planets pass before them, like
the way our moon causes an eclipse here on Earth.
The Kepler telescope stared at a single patch of the Milky Way for four years before its
pointing system failed in 2013, but the mission still succeeded in cataloguing more than 4,600
exoplanet candidates.
This means astronomers still have huge amounts of data to sort through and make new findings,
like this discovery.
With 452b, just over 1,000 of the exoplanet candidates have now been confirmed.
20 years ago this fall, the first exoplanet orbiting a distant star was discovered.
And with the successor to Kepler launching in 2017, the pace of discovery is about to
increase substantially.
The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (or TESS), will be able to cover hundreds
of times as much sky as the Kepler mission, and will identify prime targets for further
examination by the successor to Hubble, the James Webb Space Telescope, set for an October
2018 launch.
Astronomers can now project with some degree of confidence that of the 600 stars within
30 light-years of Earth, there should be roughly 60 potential earth-twins.
So, according to Dr. Didier Queloz, the man who co-discovered that first earth-like planet
20 years ago, “If we keep working so well and so enthusiastically, the issue of life
on another planet will be solved.”
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news.
For the video editor Brendan Plank, I’m his brother Bryce, thanks for watching.