New planet presents conditions for existence of liquid water
Nasa announced Monday (5) that a planet similar to the Earth has been discovered in the habitable zone of the Kepler-22 System. The planet discovered is called Kepler-22b and its distance to the star that shines as our Sun is likely to allow the existence of water in its liquid form. The distance is what determines the temperature needed for the development of life and Kepler-22b is about 600 light-years away from Earth.
Needed Similarities
According to a Kepler program scientist, Douglas Hudgins, “this is a major milestone on the road to finding Earth’s twin. Kepler’s results continue to demonstrate the importance of NASA’s science missions, which aim to answer some of the biggest questions about our place in the universe.” Planet Kepler-21b was also studied to find out if it has conditions similar to Earth, but its temperature is not as pleasant as the Kepler-22b’s.
Even though this planet might be Earth’s twin, it is still not known what it is composed of: rock, gas or liquid. Kepler-22b takes 290 days to orbit its sun and that is the reason why scientists took about three years to discover that it is, in fact, a planet. It took so long because of the method used to identify when a planet passes in front of its sun and generate extremely faint dips in light from far-away stars.
A Splash Of Luck
A scientist at the NASA Ames Research Center, Steve Howell, believes that they were lucky. “We were just real lucky. We saw the first hint of this three days after we started doing science operations right after launch,” explained the scientist. The entire Kepler spacecraft has discovered 2,326 planet candidates that might also be considered similar to the Earth.
“It’s tremendously exciting. We’re moving out to orbital periods that are nearly and equal to the Earth, and that means very soon we’re going to be finding [planets] very near the earth, what we’d call true earth analogs. We’ll be there. We’ll be there probably within a year, very easily,” said Howell.