It has been recently confirmed though the Kepler mission at NASA that another planet with a similar size to our Earth has been discovered. Kepler discovered another Earth inside a habitable zone near a star similar to the Sun. The discovery is considered as being a huge achievement in the search for an Earth 2.0.
NASA initially made the announcement about the introduction of numerous new habitable zone candidates and scientists came up with the recent discovery soon after this. Kepler-452b, the newly discovered planet, is said to be the smallest one orbiting so far inside the habitable zone. The habitable zone is a region close to a star where water in the form of liquid could collect floor of a planet orbiting a star with a type of G2.
An associate administrator from NASA’s Science Mission Directorate from the headquarters of the agency in Washington, John Grunsfeld said that on the anniversary of 20 years since the discovery that revealed that other suns are capable of hosting planets, the Kepler explorer has found a star and planet that look very similar to our Sun and Earth.
Grunsfeld also added that the new discovery will help us reach an Earth 2.0 even further. Kepler-452b is 60 percent bigger than our Earth, when it comes to diameter and the planet is believed to be a super Earth size planet. NASA said that at the current time they haven’t found the composition or the mass of the planet, however, according to prior studies, planets with the size of the newly discovered Kepler-452b are most likely to have a surface made out of rocks.
Even though Kepler-452b is larger than our Earth, its orbit is only 5 percent longer. Kepler-452b has just a 385-day orbit. The newly discovered planet is also 5 percent further from its star than our Earth is from our Sun.
NASA said in a press release that the first exoplanet orbiting another star similar to our Sun was discovered in 1995. These exoplanets, especially smaller worlds similar in size to our Earth, only belonged in the realms of science fiction just 21 years ago. At the current time, and numerous discoveries later, astronomers are about to discover a thing that a lot of people have dreamed about for a very long time, another Earth.
Kepler started working in 2009, in March and has since then confirmed over 1,000 planets and over 3,000 potential planets.
Image Source: techu4ria.com
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.