February 3, 2011

Host of Earth-like planets found

NASA's Kepler observatory has found five planets that are Earth-like in all that is relevant: size and temperature. However the observations need to be confirmed. 

A total of 54 candidate planets were found in the habitable zones of their respective stars but most are quite larger than Earth. 

This is the result of surveying just 1/400 of the sky since February 2009, when the mission began. At about that time the "lightest exoplanet to date" was still twice the size of Earth, and not even in the habitable zone at all.

Source: Science Daily.


1 comment:

  1. There is a good ongoing discussion of the Kepler data with several links and analysis at centauri-dreams.org

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