WATCH: Scientists can spend a lifetime hoping to make a discovery like the one they announced Thursday. It’s a new planet, and what’s remarkable is how strikingly similar it is to Earth. Mike Armstrong reports.
TORONTO – On Thursday, NASA announced that scientists analyzing four years’ worth of data from the Kepler Space Telescope – which searched for planets around other stars – have released a new catalogue of exoplanet candidates, including an Earth-like planet that orbits a star similar to our own sun.
Of the 500 possible planets, 12 are less than twice the diameter of Earth in that zone.
READ MORE: NASA spots more Earth-like planets out of solar system
Kepler 452b is the first one to be confirmed as a planet, lying 1,400 light-years from Earth. This planet is particularly interesting as its star is similar to our own sun. It is just 10 per cent brighter and four per cent more massive. It also orbits its star at the same distance that we do our sun, taking 385 days to complete one full orbit.
“It’s a pretty good, close cousin of Earth and our sun,” said Jon Jenkins, Kepler data analysis lead at NASA’s Ames Research Center. “And it has a somewhat better than even chance to be rocky.”
Jenkins also said that Kepler 452b — which has orbited this habitable zone for around six billion years — has a good chance of possessing life, but only with the necessary ingredients.
“We’ve gotten closer and closer to finding a twin to Earth…and this planet, 452b is the closest yet,” said Jeff Coughlin, Kepler research scientist at SETI Institute.
Searching for planets isn’t a visual endeavour: instead, Kepler looks for these possible planet candidates by observing a dip in a star’s brightness, which indicates that another body is passing in front of it, called a transit.
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Even once that is observed, however, more studies have to be done to make the confirmation.
And even once planets are confirmed, it doesn’t mean that the planet is habitable: in order to be so, astronomers believe that they must be a certain distance from its parent star, referred to as the “Goldilock’s Zone” an area that allows liquid water to exist.
Since the first exoplanet was confirmed in 1995, there have been 1,877 confirmed planets, and 4,661 Kepler candidates.
Eventually, the James Webb Telescope will be used to look for bio-signatures in some of these exoplanets.
Kepler was launched in 2009. In 2013, after two gyroscopes failed on the orbiting telescope, it was repurposed and began a mission called K2, which allows it to search for other worlds, as well as collecting observational data on stars, galaxies and supernovae.
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