Via PBS: How Close Are We to Finding an Earthlike Planet?
And what constitutes an "earthlike planet" anyway?
The Kepler Space telescope has found a small, rocky planet, the smallest yet found orbiting a star outside our solar system, the Kepler team announced Monday at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society. The finding brings us a ste closer to the planet scientist's holy grail: a planet small enough and temperate enough to host life.
Scientists have found some 500 exoplanets beyond the solar system, but most are large gas planets, like Saturn or Jupiter, too gassy to support living things.
"What's extraordinary and important and unique about this new planet is that it's definitively solid," says Geoff Marcy, a University of California, Berkeley astronomer and a co-investigator on the Kepler team. "It's a big ball of rock like earth, and astronomers have never before discovered a planet that is definitively a solid piece of rock... This new planet reminds us more closely of home than any other before."
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