It's an idea I was really intrigued by when I was a kid; are there other planets like Earth out there, spinning far enough around some bright star and with an atmosphere conducive to life? It seems there's going to be quite a bit of discovery in the next three years.
NASA's Kepler spacecraft and the European Space Agency's COROT satellite have been accumulating data that will yield some thirty scientific papers as early as next month.
"We have planets to announce, and we will have planets to announce next year — quite a few more, in fact," (William Borucki of NASA's Ames Research Center) said.
...Borucki and his colleagues expect to find many Earths — and that could help focus future observation and exploration for decades or even centuries to come.
"The biggest impact has to be to support the idea that we aren't alone, in the sense that there are other planets out there rather like the Earth," (David Latham from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) said. "We're confident that they're out there, but we don't have any yet." (Link)
Latham goes on to say that the scientific community is particularly excited at the possibility that "super Earths" may be found - planets with environments that may be even better suited than our Earth for the evolution of life.
It looks like within three years scientists will be able to say how many habitable earths are in the universe.
Comments