Most Earthlike Planets Found Yet类地行星发现最新进展.pdfVIP

Most Earthlike Planets Found Yet: A Breakthrough New exoplanets are at right distance from sun to support life, scientists say. Newfound exoplanet Kepler-62f is imagined in an illustration. The shining star to the right is Kepler-62e. Planet hunters are significantly closer to their goal of finding an Earth twin with the discovery of two planets similar in size to our own, astronomers withNASAs Kepler mission announced today. The planets, described at a NASA press conference, orbit a sun thats cooler than ours but is at the right distance to allow water to remain liquid, which is considered essential for a planet to support life. (Read about a related discovery in 2011:NASAs Kepler Finds Two Earth-Size Planets Around Sunlike Star.) And because of their sizes and orbits, the newfound planets are likely either rocky—like Earth—or watery, NASA scientists said. The two planets are located 1,200 light-years away in a five-planet system orbiting a star dubbed Kepler-62. Called Kepler-62e and -62f, the planets are by far the best candidates for habitability of any found so far, said William Borucki of NASAs Ames Research Center, the science principal investigator for the agencys Kepler Space Telescope. If you were on Kepler-62f and looking at the sun, it would be a little less yellow than ours, said Borucki, whose announcement coincided with the release of a study on the topic in the journal Science. And at sunset the sky would be more red. But otherwise it would basically look and feel the same, he said. I would call this a breakthrough discovery. The press conference also introduced another study released today in theAstrophysical Journal , which involves a related discovery of a sun very much like our own named Kepler-69. Exoplanet Hunters The newly found extrasolar planets, or exoplanets, are part of a vast menagerie of celestial bodies discovered in recent years. Our Milky Way galaxy alone is now known to have hundreds of billions of planets circ