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Astronomers Discover Earth’s “Cousin” Planet Through Pasadena Jet Propulsion Laboratory Telescope

Published on Tuesday, April 22, 2014 | 4:18 am
 

The artistic concept of Kepler-186f is the result of scientists and artists collaborating to imagine the appearance of these distant worlds. Image credit: NASA Ames/SETI Institute/JPL-Caltech

Scientists were able to discover the first Earth-size planet orbiting a star in the “habitable zone,” using the Kepler Space Telescope at Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.

Kepler-186f’s inclusion in the habitable zone means that “liquid water might pool on the planet’s surface,” NASA said.

The space agency said other planets had been discovered in the habitable zone before, but they are all at least 40 percent larger in size than Earth and “understanding their makeup is challenging.”

“The discovery of Kepler-186f is a significant step toward finding worlds like our planet Earth,” said Paul Hertz, NASA’s Astrophysics Division director at the agency’s headquarters in Washington. “Future NASA missions will discover the nearest rocky exoplanets and determine their composition and atmospheric conditions, continuing humankind’s quest to find truly Earth-like worlds.”

The Kepler-186f, meanwhile, is more reminiscent of Earth and its discovery confirms that planets the size of Earth exist in the habitable zone of stars other than the sun, according to NASA.

But Thomas Barclay, research scientist at the Bay Area Environmental Research Institute at Ames, said “being in the habitable zone does not mean that the planet is habitable.”

“The temperature on the planet is strongly dependent on what kind of atmosphere the planet has,” Barclay said. “Kepler-186f can be thought of as an Earth-cousin rather than an Earth-twin. It has many properties that resemble Earth.”

NASA said it is yet to find out the mass and composition of Kepler-186f, but previous research suggests that a planet of its size is likely to be rocky.

According to NASA, Kepler-186f orbits its star once every 130 days and receives one-third the energy from its star that Earth gets from the sun, placing it nearer the outer edge of the habitable zone. The agency added that the brightness of Kepler-186f’s star at high noon is only as bright as the sun appears about an hour before sunset.

NASA said their next step is to look for and measure the composition of true “Earth-twins,” which have the same size of the Earth and orbits within the habitable zone of a sun-like star.

The Kepler Space Telescope is NASA’s first mission capable of detecting Earth-size planets around stars like the sun, and it measures the brightness of more than 150,000 stars.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena manages Kepler mission development. For more information about the Kepler mission, visit http://www.nasa.gov/kepler.

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