Researchers at Harvard University are excited about what may be the biggest discovery yet made in the field of exoplanets, with University of Maryland astronomer Drake Deming calling it "arguably the most important planet ever found outside the solar system."
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Astronomers have identified a star system just 22 light years from Earth with three planets that could potentially harbor life. The Gliese star system is easy to locate in the constellation Scorpius. The two main stars, Gliese 667A and B, are visible to the naked eye, but the one with the planets, Gliese 667C, requires a telescope to see. Gliese 667C has 7 planets, and 3 of them are in its habitable zone, which is the region around the star where temperatures would not be too high or too low for life to form, and where water would be a liquid. Earth is near the center of the sun’s habitable zone, and Venus and Mars are at its extremes.
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Three more Earth-like planets have been discovered by the Kepler Telescope, and it is becoming clear to scientists that there are Earth-like planets "everywhere," according to Kepler scientist Tom Barclay. Two of the planets are 1,200 light years away, and the other is 2,700 light years distant.
Kepler 62f and Kepler 62e are the closest to Earth-like. They both orbit a somewhat dimmer star than our own in the constellation Lyra, 1,200 light years away. Traveling at 99% of the speed of light, a starship would pass one day for every year that would pass on Earth. Such a ship could reach the newly discovered solar system in about 6 ship years, but more than a millennium would pass on Earth.
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Using NASA’s Kepler spacecraft, astronomers are beginning to find Earth-sized planets orbiting distant stars. A new analysis of Kepler data shows that about 17% of stars have an Earth-sized planet in an orbit closer than Mercury. Since the Milky Way has about 100 billion stars, there are at least 17 billion Earth-sized worlds out there. The odds are that at least ONE of these harbors intelligent life.
Altogether, researchers have found that 50% of stars have a planet of Earth-size or larger in a close orbit. By adding larger planets, which have been detected in wider orbits up to the orbital distance of the Earth, this number reaches 70%. In other words, practically all Sun-like stars have planets.
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