Possible Habitable Planets Found Hiding In Kepler Data May Be Great Bets For Life
Astronomers have discovered a host of habitable planets hiding in data from the Kepler space telescope, which may include some of the best candidates for finding life outside the Solar System. The data comes from Kepler’s first run of observations, from 2009 to 2013, when the telescope was pointed at one region of the sky. Led by Susan Thompson from the SETI Institute in California, the team found 20 promising candidates for Earth-like worlds, orbiting Sun-like stars on similar orbits to our own. A pre-print of their findings is available on arXiv . One in particular, KOI-7923.01, looks particularly promising. It is 97 percent the size of Earth, and orbits its star in 395 days. It’s slightly further from its star than Earth is from the Sun, which means it is likely a bit colder than our planet, with tundra-like conditions. “If you had to choose one to send a spacecraft to, it’s not a bad option,” Jeff Coughlin from NASA’s Ames Research Center, a co-author on the paper, told New Scienti...