Bill Borucki, Kepler principal Investigator at NASA's Ames Research Center, speaks during a news conference about the newly discovered planet Kepler-22b on Monday in in Moffett Field, Calif.
A newly discovered planet is eerily similar to Earth and is sitting outside our solar system in what seems to be the ideal place for life, expect for one hitch. It’s a bit too big.
The planet is smack in the middle of what astronomers call the Goldilocks zone, that hard-to-find place that’s not too hot, not too cold, where water, which is essential for life, doesn’t freeze or boil. Its surface temperature is near 22 C, scientists say.
The planet’s confirmation was announced Monday by NASA along with other discoveries by its Kepler telescope, which was launched on a planet-hunting mission in 2009.
That’s the first planet confirmed in the habitable zone for Kepler, which had already found Earth-like rocky planets elsewhere. Twice before astronomers have announced a planet found in that zone, but neither have been as promising.
“This is a phenomenal discovery in the course of human history,” Geoff Marcy of University of California, Berkeley, one of the pioneers of planet-hunting outside our solar system, said in an e-mail.
The new planet – named Kepler-22b – has key aspects it shares with Earth. It circles a star that could be the twin of our sun and at just about the same distance. The planet’s year of 290 days is even close to ours. It likely has water and rock.
The only trouble is the planet’s a bit big for life to exist on the surface. The planet is about 2.4 times the size of Earth. It could be more like the gas-and-liquid Neptune with only a rocky core and mostly ocean.
“It’s so exciting to imagine the possibilities,” said Natalie Batalha, the Kepler deputy science chief.
Floating on that “world completely covered in water” could be like being on an Earth ocean and “it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that life could exist in such an ocean,” Ms. Batalha said in a phone interview.
So far the Kepler telescope has spotted 2,326 candidate planets outside our solar system with 139 of them potentially habitable ones. Even though the confirmed Kepler-22b is a bit big, it is still smaller than most of the other candidates.
Chief Kepler scientist William Borucki said he thinks the planet is somewhere between Earth and gas-and-liquid Neptune, but that it has a lot of rocky material.
The planet is 600 light years away. Each light year is 5.9 trillion miles. It would take a space shuttle about 22 million years to get there.
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