Kepler mission spots new Earth-like planet

Named Kepler-452b after the Kepler Space Telescope, which discovered it, the exoplanet is about 60 percent larger than Earth, making it a type of planet called a super-Earth, NASA disclosed at a news conference that was live-streamed online.

John Grunsfeld, NASA’s science mission chief, emphasized that the exoplanet system identified Thursday – “a pretty good close cousin to the Earth and our sun” – is the closet so far.

Kepler-452 is a lot like our Sun in that it is about the same size (10 per cent larger, actually) and temperature, but it’s also 20 percent brighter and about 6 billion years old (1.5 billion years older than the Sun). It’s the smallest planet yet discovered orbiting in the habitable zone of a G2-type star (like our sun).

And that star is what astronomers label a class-G, “main sequence” star, the same as our Sunday.

With four years of data from the Kepler telescope, researchers from NASA and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute (SETI) reported their discovery of Kepler 452b along with 11 other possibly inhabitable exoplanets and 500 potential candidates. We’re finding out if planets like Earth are common – and the answer seems, so far, to be yes. Kepler searched for such a planet in what scientists call a “habitable zone”, a region were orbiting planets are at a safe enough distance from their stars to support the existence of liquid water.

One unanswered question is whether the planet is rocky.

“That’s considerable time and oppurtunity for life to arise somewhere on its surface or in its oceans should all the necessary ingredients and conditions for life exist on this planet”, he added.

It has discovered more than 1,000 planets.

Kepler-452b is 5 percent farther from its star than Earth is from the Sunday. To give you an idea of how long it would take to reach Kepler-425b, our nearest neighbor, Proxima Centauri, is only 4.2 light years away. It was discovered using Nasa’s Kepler space telescope and circles a star that is similar in size and temperature to the Sunday. This is because Kepler looks at stars and notices tiny changes in the light from the star, which indicate a planet passing in front of it. If these changes occur multiple times, it indicates a planet may be present.

Coughlin commented on the challenges in confirming the existence of Kepler 452b.

In a statement, NASA said that the confirmation of Kepler-452b brings the total number of confirmed planets to 1,030. Once detected, the planet’s orbital size and mass can be determined.