“This exciting result brings us one step closer to finding an Earth Two”.
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NASA on Thursday confirmed the invention of the first close to-Earth-measurement planet, Kepler-452b, within the “liveable zone” around a sun-like star by its Kelper Telescope.
What makes the discovery especially intriguing is that the planet is orbiting the habitable zone of the solar system, the “Goldilocks” region where it’s not too hot or too cold, so that the surface of the planet could sustain liquid water.
“Today the Earth is a little less lonely because there is a new kid on the block”, said Jon Jenkins, Kepler data analysis leader at Nasa’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California.
“That’s substantial opportunity for life to arise, should all the necessary ingredients and conditions for life exist on this planet”, he said in a statement. Its star is four percent more massive than ours and 20 percent brighter, indicating that it is older and casting more heat at objects in its orbit.
The planet’s star, Kepler 452, is slightly bigger than our own Sunday.
From a vantage point 64 million miles from Earth, it scans the light from distant stars, looking for nearly imperceptible drops in a star’s brightness, suggesting a planet has passed in front of it. But if the assumptions of planetary geologists are correct, he said, Kepler-452b’s atmosphere would probably be thicker than Earth’s, and it would have active volcanoes.
The Kepler space observatory was designed to look for planets like Kepler 452b, which are close to the Earth’s size and in orbit around sunlike stars. But because the plane of the orbit must be parallel to Earth’s line-of-sight to be detected, Jenkins says that each discovery of an Earth-like planet by Kepler leaves possibly another 50 undetected.
The new survey satellite will continue searching nearby solar systems for Earth-like exoplanets with new technology. Sophisticated computer programs and follow-up observations with a ground-based telescopes then determine if some of the light dips were caused by planets passing in front of their parent stars, relative to Kepler’s line of sight.
This image compares the size of Earth with the size of Kepler 452b That’s much different to years on other, closer planets to Earth. The list of potential planets includes 11 other near-Earth twins, nine of which circle sun-like stars.
“If Kepler 452b is indeed a rocky planet, its location could mean that it is just entering a runaway greenhouse phase of its climate history”, said Doug Caldwell, a Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence Institute scientist working on the Kepler mission.
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It has discovered more than 1,000 planets.
