The planets, called Kepler-20e and Kepler-20f, are the smallest planets outside the solar system confirmed around a star like the Sun, NASA said in a statement.
The planets are too close to their star to be in the so-called habitable zone where liquid water could exist on a planet's surface.
"This discovery demonstrates for the first time that Earth-size planets exist around other stars, and that we are able to detect them," Francois Fressin of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, said in the statement.
The new planets are thought to be rocky. Kepler-20e is slightly smaller than Venus, measuring 0.87 times the radius of Earth.
Kepler-20f is slightly larger than Earth, measuring 1.03 times its radius. Both planets are in a five-planet system called Kepler-20, about 1,000 light-years away in the constellation Lyra.
Being able to detect Earth-sized planets in distant solar systems is pretty important if your goal is finding other Earth-like planets out there. We're not going to find anyone waving back I suspect in my lifetime, but at some point in human history we're going to find something out there, somewhere.
That is if we don't blow ourselves up, cook our atmosphere, or flood the planet first. Even money on which happens first down the road.
No comments:
Post a Comment