Kepler-186f --- A New Earth . ?

[MindMover]

An Astronomical Discovery: Earth-Size Planet Found in Its Star’s Habitable Zone

I have some cautiously exciting exoplanets news: Astronomers have announced the discovery of a planet that is very nearly the same size as Earth and orbiting its star in the habitable zone—that is, at the right distance from its star to have liquid water on its surface. We don’t know how Earth-like it is, but this shows that we’re edging closer and closer to finding another Earth, and this one is the best bet we’ve found so far.

The planet is called Kepler-186f and was discovered using the Kepler Space Telescope, which was designed to look for planets orbiting other stars. Kepler exploits what’s called the transit method: It stares at 150,000 stars all the time, looking for dips in the amount of light received from every star. The idea is that if a star has planets, and if we see the orbits edge-on, then every time the planet passes between us and its parent star it’ll block an teensy bit of light (usually far less than 1 percent).

This method is extremely powerful—about a thousand planets have been found this way in Kepler data! In fact, most of the planets found this way have been from Kepler. Another cool thing is that if you know how big the star is (and we generally do) then you can also determine the size of the planet by how much light it blocks.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2014/04/17/kepler_186f_earth_sized_planet_in_the_habitable_zone.html

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This is exciting news ... very exciting ....

[nadinbrzezinski]

1. I expect an announcement of life away from Sol

In the next ten years. The next mission will be able to tell atmospheres

[grahamhgreen]

2. I'm hoping we find

intellegent life of earth soon too

[Humanist_Activist]

3. Oxygen, they need to find free molecular oxygen, either O2 or O3, that will be the smoking...

gun for sure. We aren't aware of any other natural processes besides biological ones that can produce it, usually oxygen is locked up in various oxides with other elements.

[mylye2222]

4. corporations' reaction (irony)

OH YES. Another Earth to colonize and pollute once we will be finish all what we vould to destroy the actual planet on were we are! !!!

Go to hell.