Earth-like alien world looms into view through Kepler telescope - New Scientist
Meet Kepler 452b, Earth’s new alien cousin. This rocky planet is the first alien world we’ve seen that circles a sun-like star at a distance that should allow liquid water to exist on its surface.
The planet came to light after a first pass through the full data set
collected during the NASA Kepler telescope’s four-year run. The
analysis also yielded about a dozen other candidate worlds close to the
size of Earth in the habitable zone around their stars.
Kepler’s original mission has ended,
so the new discoveries come not from new data but from
ever-more-thorough analyses of the existing data. Small Earth-like
planets have proved the hardest to tease out. “We’re treading through
the weeds looking for these tiny stones,” says Natalie Batalha from the NASA Ames Research Center in California.
The new search adds more than 500 planets to the roughly 4000 planet candidates the Kepler team has already announced, of which about a quarter of have already been confirmed through follow-up studies.
But the newest confirmed planet, 452b, is in an Earth-like class by
itself. “Today the Earth is a little less lonely, because there’s a new
kid on the block,” says Jon Jenkins,
also at NASA Ames. The new planet was confirmed when team members
calculated that there was a less than 1 per cent chance that a pair of
eclipsing binaries or a background transiting planet could be polluting
the signal.
