Kepler has a Sun too, similar to Earth.
By Raif Karerat
WASHINGTON, DC: NASA has announced the discovery of a new planet outside our solar system that it describes as the “closest twin to Earth” found to date.
“Today we’re announcing the discovery of an exoplanet that as far as we can tell, is a pretty close cousin to the Earth and our sun,” NASA researchers announced. ““This is about the closest twin to earth 2.0 that we’ve found so far, and I really emphasize so far.”
Not only is the planet capable of sustaining life due to the atmospheric temperature being neither too hot nor too cold to sustain liquid water — its star resembles an older version of our Sun, the U.S. space agency revealed..
Named Kepler-452b after the Kepler Space Telescope, which discovered it, the exoplanet is about 60 percent larger than Earth, making it a type of planet called a super-Earth, NASA disclosed at a news conference that was live-streamed online.
Seth Shostak from the SETI Institute (Search for Extraterrestrial Life) told Popular Science that NASA has already scanned Kepler-452b with the Allen Telescope Array looking for radio signals emanating from any potential life forms there, but the planet appears to be silent.
NASA is calling the planet a “close cousin,” rather than a twin, because of its larger size, which would give it five times the mass of the Earth and double the gravity.
“You and I would weigh twice as much as we do now on the planet”, John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington, told CBC News. ” We’d also expect the atmosphere to be thicker and with more cloud cover, with very active volcanoes,” he added.
Regardless, John Jenkins, the Kepler Space Telescope’s lead data analyst at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California believes the newly discovered planet, which is located 1,400 light years away in the constellation Cygnus, “would feel a lot like home.”
Kepler was launched in 2009 and specifically designed to hunt for planets around distant stars. According to CBC, it searches for a dip in the light from a star as the planet passes in front of it, blocking part of the cosmic luminescence. To date, it has found more than 3,000 planet candidates and confirmed more than 1,000 planets.