The Kepler Space Telescope has been on the forefront of discovering exoplanets in the far reaches of space, trying to pinpoint and locate planets that closely resemble our own. This endeavor entails scanning hundreds of thousands of star systems in order to find planets that are in the Goldilocks, or habitable, zones from their stars, making them suitable candidates for supporting life. The search so far by the telescope has yielded many promising results, with almost seventeen billion Earth-sized exoplanets discovered so far, and, according to researchers, the telescope may have discovered its most promising find yet.
According to researchers working on the NASA-built telescope, two exoplanets have been identified as having the right size and being the right distance from their star, making the possibility of finding liquid water very high. The two planets, part of a five-planet solar system that revolves around the star Kepler-62, located in the Lyra Constellation and the planets themselves, Kepler-62e and Kepler-62f, are the outermost planets in the Kepler-62 system, putting them in the Goldilocks zone.
The Goldilocks zone itself is basically the ideal distance for a planet from its star to possess the ideal conditions for life, namely the right temperatures to have liquid water. Speaking about the discovery to the magazine, Science, lead researcher Bill Borucki said, “They are the best candidates found to date for habitable planets," with Lisa Kaltenegger of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg explaining: "Let us assume that the planets Kepler-62e and -62f are indeed rocky, as their radius would indicate. Let us further assume that they have water and their atmospheric composition is similar to that of Earth, dominated by nitrogen, and containing water and carbon dioxide. In that case, both planets could have liquid water on their surface: Kepler-62f gets less radiation energy from its host star than the Earth from the Sun and therefore needs more greenhouse gases, for instance more carbon dioxide, than Earth to remain unfrozen. Kepler-62e is closer to its star, and needs an increased cloud cover, sufficient to reflect some of the star's radiation, to allow for liquid water on its surface."
Of course, whether or not Kepler-62e and Kepler-62f have habitable conditions as explained above will only be confirmed through technology in the future, as present-day telescopes are unable to study the planets, owing to the interference of the host stars. But scientists have said that more sensitive telescopes that will be able to study the atmospheres for certain indicators will be able to determine whether such are indeed homes away from home.
Rico says we'll likely never see them, but isn't it nice to know they're out there?
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