Astronomers are discovering exoplanets—worlds orbiting other stars—all the time, but eight new ones recently found are more exciting: They are roughly the size of Earth, and all orbit in their stars’ habitable zones (the distance where conditions are good for liquid water on a planet’s surface). Two in particular are pretty close to having potentially Earth-like conditions, which is very interesting indeed.
The planets were all first found using NASA’s Kepler space telescope. Kepler has been looking for several years at one patch of the sky containing about 150,000 stars. If planets orbit any of those stars, and the orbits happen to be seen edge-on from Earth, the planets will pass directly in front of their stars, dimming them ever so slightly. This “transit method” has been amazingly successful, and Kepler recently had its 1,000th exoplanet confirmed.
The sizes of the planets can be found by determining how much the starlight dims; the bigger the planet, the more star it blocks. Quite a few planets have been found roughly the size of the Earth, but only a handful have been at the right place from their star to have potentially clement temperatures.
Read more:
http://interstellar-news.blogspot.com/2015/01/eight-newly-found-exoplanets-look-to-be.html
