The announcement of NASA ‘s discovery of Earth-like exoplanet Kepler-452b created a social media buzz about the chances of finding our second home, but some experts are doubtful if we can ever get there. That’s important because it makes the planet ripe, potentially, for liquid water on the surface. Change in it any material way and you diminish its capacity to support existing lifeforms, including human life, and that is precisely what we are doing today by altering the climate, changing the chemistry of the oceans, and destroying entire ecosystems. Natalie Batalha, one of NASA’s scientist, has just recently revealed to an interview with the Voice of America that their galactic researches shows that there are billions of planets that closely resemble the Earth. NASA scientists believe that there could be about 1 billion Earth-like planets in the Milky Way alone.
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Many of these are gas giants, a large number of which orbit closer to their star than Mercury does: these are known as Hot Jupiters. The average size of these planets is between the size of earth and the size of Neptune.
The “super-Earth” is described as Earth’s “bigger, older cousin”, and is estimated to be the sixth-most Earth-like exoplanet we have so far discovered.
Scientists now are producing the last catalog based on the original Kepler mission’s four-year data set.
NASA’s discovery of Earth-like planets in distant solar systems is exciting, but NASA this past week also unveiled a dazzling photograph of the most valuable piece of real estate in the entire galaxy: Earth.
Kepler-452b is 1,400 light-years away, and a potential trip with our current technology would take, oh, about 26 million years.
Kepler has discovered 1,030 confirmed planets since its launch in 2009.
“It might be quite challenging at first”, Jon Jenkins, of NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, said during a news conference yesterday.
From this method a planet’s mass can be determined and its orbit calculated using Kepler’s laws of planetary motion.
Scientists posit that, despite its similarities to Earth, living on our planet’s larger cousin Kepler-452b, would be an alien experience – no pun intended. According to Jenkins, it’s the nearest thing to one more Earth-sun twin system.
Kepler-452b, compared to Earth, has a 5% longer orbit, spanning 385 Earth days.
Published July 26, 2015 ” NASA’s Kepler spacecraft spots a planet similar to earth”.
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Planet 452b is among more than 500 new entries listed in the Kepler team’s latest catalog of exoplanet candidates released Thursday.
