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Newfound Planet Has Earth-Like Orbit
Raver32 writes with a link to the Space.com site, and an article discussing an extra-solar planet that looks a lot like ours from a distance. At least, its orbit does. The planet is located about 300 light years away, in the constellation Perseus. It circles its giant red star every 360 days and was discovered by 'looking for wobble', the shift in a star's movement that hints at orbiting planets. "The discovery could help astronomers understand what will happen to our sun's brood of planets when it exhausts its store of hydrogen fuel and its outer envelope begins to swell. When that happens in an estimated 5 billion years, our sun will be so big that it will engulf the inner planets and most likely Earth. But long before that happens, life on our planet will have perished and its seas will have boiled away."
That will be the next great "bad physics" movie: The sun has run out of hydrogen! We must drive a giant drill into the center of the SUN to explode twelve hydrogen bombs or America will be destroyed!
Just because it orbits in 360 days doesn't mean it has an Earth-like orbit.
Earthlike in any other way? Not likely.
The Bad Astronomer had a nice examination of this article earlier today.