Eight Planets Found That May Support Life
Amazingly, astronomers have discovered eight new planets revolving their stars in the "Goldilocks zone" that is "neither too hot nor too cold for water and possibly life to exist", according to cnn.com.
The finding thus shows that there are double the number of planets that are close to the Earth and are in the "habitable zones" of their stars.
Among the eight planets, there are exactly two that are as close to the earth as any other found outside the solar system, say the astronomers to the 225th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle, Washington.
"Most of these planets have a good chance of being rocky, like Earth," said lead author Guillermo Torres of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, according to dailymail.com.
NASA's planet-hunting Kepler mission has found all the eight planets. However, they are all too small to be validated with a comparative scale of the mass, so scientists used a computer program called BLENDER to check whether their statistics can qualify them to be planets.
This is the measure that "has been used previously to validate some of Kepler's most iconic finds, including the first two Earth-size planets around a sun-like star and the first exoplanet smaller than Mercury," it said.
However, even as it is interesting to be aware of the possibility of life in another planet, the look-alikes are too distant to be studied or assessed.
Kepler-438b is at a distance of 470 lightyears from Earth, has a diameter that is 12 percent bigger than Earth, and maintains a 70 percent chance of being rocky, researchers said.
Secondly, Kepler-442b is 1,100 lightyears away. This one is a third larger than Earth, with a three in five chance of being a rocky planet.
"That's a little far away," Caldwell said, "We need to get to Mars first."
"We don't know for sure whether any of the planets in our sample are truly habitable," said second author David Kipping, also of Harvard-Smithsonian. "All we can say is that they're promising candidates."
