I remember sitting in Physics class, sometime in Form 4, and asking the inevitable question — "But, Sir, is there really life on other planets?’ (Well, someone had to!) I remember him leaning against his desk and crossing his arms before saying, "Well, Earth has life on it because it’s the right distance from the sun to, and because of its water percentage and atmosphere. You really think there aren’t other planets out there like us, in other galaxies?’
Well…he was right.
We’ve found a New Earth, ladies and gentlemen! NASA confirmed earlier this week that a constellation not far off from us (and, of course, by that, we mean a couple hundred light years away) has a planet that is very Earth like. Good news for us, of course, if we ever destroy our planet so badly that we need to find a new home.
Hopefully space technology will have advanced to a point by then that a couple of hundred light years can be reached in a few weeks rather than…a couple of hundred years.
The Kepler-186 System, found in the Cygenus constellation and named after the famous astronomer, has a planet on it that is so far unnamed, but scientists have dubbed Kepler-186f, it being the 6th planet farthest from the centre in the system. The region where liveable planets are called has been named "the Goldilocks Zone’ by scientists — obviously a very well thought out pun — and is the region where planetary objects can support liquids.
While this is not the first "new Earth’ to be found — scientists estimate another 40 billion Earth-sized planets in our own Milky Way — Kepler-186f is the first to be found orbiting another star altogether. The fact that this planet is at a certain distance from the sun, and if hypothetically the atmosphere and liquid percentages are similar to Earth, then the theory of there being life on this planet gains a whole new weight.
An "Earth Analog’ is a planet that has similar conditions to the ones on our own. Other discoveries have been made of other planets similar to Earth, but Kepler-186f is the one that has come the closets so far, apparently.
More information on space discoveries can be found at www.nasa.gov .