Yesterday, I reported that there was going to be a big announcement coming from NASA on its Kepler mission regarding the topic of alien planets. Well, the 1pm press conference came and went and the world was left with the information that astronomers have confirmed the existence of two Earth-sized planets around another star 950 light years distant. To date, these are the smallest extrasolar planets ever found.
So, what does this mean for the search for alien life?
Well, the bad news is that these two planets are just about incapable of supporting life as both rotate very close to their parent star, making them far too hot to support life as we know it. Now, while the chances of these planets supporting life are small to say the least, the implications of this finding are truly enormous.
Lead researcher Francois Fressin called the discovery “the beginning of an [new] era.” in that this is the first time that astronomers have been able to detect planets smaller than the earth orbiting another star. Up until just a few years ago, all of the known extrasolar planets were massive, Jupiter-like worlds that could exert massive gravitational tugs on their parent stars, thus betraying their presence to astronomers doing planet hunting with the Doppler Shift method. The revolutionary thing about Kepler is that it actually looks for dips in brightness caused by a planet's transit across its star's face, which makes it possible to detect planets that would never show up via Doppler.
Now, while not exactly a cakewalk, planet hunting has become relatively easy, so much so that new focus is being put on finding rocky, Earth-like planets like the ones whose existence was announced yesterday. Gone of the days of being content with Jupiter-sized gas worlds. This spring, NASA announced that Kepler had detected over 1,200 probable planets and just this month, NASA announced the discovery of the most Earth-like planet yet. In the wake of such a monumental discovery, the finding of Earth-sized planets by the Kepler team is just the latest stepping stone in the quest to determine whether we are truly alone in the universe.
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