An artist's conception of Kepler 186f IMAGE, NASAIt’s 500 light-years away, but a recently found planet is the closest thing to Earth that astronomers have found yet. “Kepler 186f” is similar in size to Earth and, thanks to its position in the “Goldilocks zone” (neither too far nor too close to the star it orbits), its temperature is likely in the range suitable for liquid water and life. “Kepler 186f is the first validated, Earth-size planet in the habitable zone of another star,” Elisa Quintana of the SETI Institute and NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, said at a news conference announcing the discovery on Thursday (April 17). “It has the right size and is at the right distance to have properties similar to our home planet.” A paper detailing the findings was published last week in Science.
Kepler 186f, named after NASA’s Kepler planet-finding mission, is 10 percent wider than Earth (8,700 miles versus 7,918 miles in diameter) and takes only 130 days to complete one full orbit around its star, a red dwarf that is smaller and fainter than the Sun. Nonetheless, researchers are excited by the prospect that the planet could potentially support life. “This planet is still considered potentially habitable, as long as it has a dense enough atmosphere, even though it receives less light from its star than Mars does from our sun,” Victoria Meadows, an astrobiologist and planetary astronomer at the University of Washington who was not involved in the research, told The New York Times. “It’s fun to note that if the planet is habitable, photosynthesis ...
