Earth-like Planets? Yes. Earth-like Life? Almost Certainly
These days when we have a whole political party that is openly hostile to science, and a decent faction of the nation’s population that is antagonistic to reason and rationality, it is nice when a hard science story breaks through the noise.
Especially nice when the story is inherently hopeful and guiless in it’s sci-fi geekyness
The space-based Kepler telescope, which circles the sun trailing Earth’s orbit, observes more than 155,000 stars and every half-hour measures the amount of light they give off. If a planet is orbiting a star, it is detectable because it temporarily blocks a bit of light each time it crosses in front of its star.
By measuring how much of a star’s light a planet blocks during such transits, scientists can deduce what the planet’s radius must be. By tracking how frequently each planet transits, they can determine how closely it orbits its star.
Prior to Kepler, scientists had confirmed the existence of more than 500 planets outside our solar system, which are known as exoplanets. Among the 1,235 new candidates, 68 are Earth-sized, 288 are super-Earth-sized (up to about 10 times the Earth’s mass), 662 are Neptune-sized and 165 are about the size of Jupiter, the largest planet within our solar system, Borucki said. Nineteen are up to twice the size of Jupiter.
A couple of things not mentioned in the article. Kepler uses the transit method to detect planets therefore can only detect planets orbiting their stars if they are in the same plane of view as seen from Kepler’s orbit. Meaning there are a heck of a lot more planets (like 98% more) that it can’t detect.
Also, the fastest “thing” humans have ever build and currently the most distant man made object from the earth, is Voyager 2. Traveling at 16.08 km/s (36,000mph), it has managed to put 8.7 billion miles between us and it since its launch in 1977. Put another way, it is about 15 light minutes away.
Our nearest star, besides the sun, is 4.25 light years away. All of the candidate planets discovered are in the 500 to 3000 lightyears away distance. Damn, space is really big, and we have a long way to go.
Oddly enough, it is the “anti-science” Republicans who are seeking to improve NASA, while the “pro-science” liberals (including this NASA employee) who are out to destroy it because Republicans support it.