Scientists find planet that closely matches Earth

Its star, Kepler 452, is also older and bigger, as well as brighter than our Sunday.

“Today the earth is a little less lonely because there is a new kid on the block who moved in just right next door, in terms of the surface temperature of the star it orbits and the energy it receives from the star”.

Nasa’s Kepler spacecraft has spotted a planet which they describe as “Earth’s bigger, older cousin”.

The star is estimated to be 1.2 billion years older than the Sunday. Slightly more than 1,000 of them are confirmed to be planets. Kepler-452b is the name given to the planet, which is approximately 60% larger in diameter than our planet.

It is 1,400 light-years away from our planet in the constellation Cygnus and is believed to be rocky with active volcanoes.

The newly discovered Kepler-452b is the smallest planet to date discovered orbiting in the habitable zone – the area around a star where liquid water could pool on the surface of an orbiting planet – of a G2-type star, like our Sunday. Popular Mechanics reports on a new exoplanet – an earth-like planet that has been recently discovered that just might be habitable too.

“In my mind, this is the closest thing we have to another planet like the Earth”, astronomer Jon Jenkins, with the U.S. space agency’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, told reporters on a conference call. The planet is 5 per cent farther from its parent star Kepler-452 than Earth is from the Sunday.

But Kepler 452b is the first to be confirmed as a planet and NASA said it was the “closest” to Earth that has ever been seen.

Attempts to learn if Kepler-452b has an atmosphere likely will have to wait for a new generation of more sensitive space telescopes, said NASA’s associate administrator John Grunsfeld. “That’s substantial opportunity for life to arise, should all the necessary ingredients and conditions for life exist on this planet.”(Scroll to read on…).

“Sun-like stars are people’s favorites, because we know of one circumstance [Earth] where that paid off [for life]”, said Seth Shostak, the Director of SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), which participated in the discovery, in a statement to IFLScience.

(Photo: NASA/W. Stenzel) The seventh Kepler planet candidate catalog – 4,696 planet candidates now known as of Jan 2015. These findings are derived from data publicly available on the NASA Exoplanet Archive.

The scientists from NASA hold over four years of data to back up their reports. The final analysis will be conducted using sophisticated software that is increasingly sensitive to the tiny telltale signatures of Earth-size planets.

The last Kepler discovery that had scientists gushing was just over a year ago. Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corporation operates the flight system with support from the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado in Boulder.