Kepler-62 Has 2 Good Candidate Planets In the Search for Life

astroengine writes "About 1,200 light-years from Earth, five planets are circling around sun-like star Kepler-62, two of which are fortuitously positioned for water, if any exists, to remain liquid on their surfaces — a condition believed to be necessary for life. The discovery, made by scientists using NASA's planet-hunting Kepler space telescope, is the strongest evidence yet for more than one Earth-sized planet existing in a star's so-called 'habitable' zone. 'We're particularly delighted to find that there are two planets in the habitable zone,' lead Kepler scientist William Borucki, with NASA's Ames Research Center in California, told Discovery News. 'It sort of doubles our chances of finding that Earth we'd all like to find. When you think about Earth and Mars, if Mars had been a bit larger, if Jupiter hadn't been so close, we'd again have two planets in the habitable zone and maybe we'd have a place to go,' he said." There's also a third planet believed to be a good candidate for hosting water.

Comments

Re:That's nice...

[coastwalker]

Human beings are never going to get outside the solar system, the distance is just too great to get them to even the nearest star as bags of cells in water. But there is a reasonable chance that we can both transmit and receive information from other civilizations - all be it completely asynchronously. If we get really good at robots we might be able to seed a few local stars with self repairing robots with a range of science fiction purposes, but we will probably never know if they make it. Our current lifestyle is more likely to lead to human extinction before such grand objectives are attainable however, we are doing a lousy job of ensuring our own long term viability on the earth currently and it doesn't look likely to change soon. Heck its good fun though!