Using a potent NASA space telescope to scan the skies for planets like our own where life might exist, astronomers said on Thursday they have found the most Earth-like candidates yet.
Two of the five planets orbiting a sun-like star called Kepler-62 are squarely in what astronomers call the habitable zone — not too hot, not too cold and possibly bearing water, researchers said in the journal Science.
“These two are our best candidates that might be habitable,” said William Borucki, Kepler science principal investigator at NASA’s Ames Research Center.
Photo: AFP / NASA Ames / JPL-Caltech
The two planets are slightly larger than ours and at least a couple of billion years older.
The first, 62e, is about 40 percent larger than Earth.
It might be warm, maybe even a waterworld, and it may experience flashes of lightning, Borucki said.
The second, 62f, is about 60 percent larger than our planet and orbits its star every 267 days, close to Earth’s annual trajectory of 365 days.
The planet may have polar caps, significant land masses and liquid water, Borucki said.
Both are orbiting a seven-billion-year-old star about 1,200 light years from Earth in the constellation Lyra.
They are close enough to their star to be warm, but not so near as to boil the oceans. They are far enough to maintain the likelihood of water without freezing the seas solid, Borucki said.
Scientists do not yet know if their surfaces are rocky or watery, or if they have atmospheres that could sustain life, but their location and size suggest they “could plausibly be composed of condensible compounds and be solid, either as a dry, rocky super-Earth or one composed of a significant amount of water,” the study said.
Other studies have indicated that planets with a radius under 1.6 times that of the Earth, like these two, “have been found to have densities indicative of a rocky composition.”
Astronomers detected the planets by observing their star dim when the planets pass in front of it, in what is known as a “transit.”
“These are the most similar objects to Earth that we have found yet,” said Justin Crepp, assistant professor of physics at the University of Notre Dame.
All together, the latest findings add seven new planets — four of which are outside the habitable zone — to the tally that Kepler has found so far, totaling more than 2,700 candidates and confirmed planets.
Eleven people, including a former minister, were arrested in Serbia on Friday over a train station disaster in which 16 people died. The concrete canopy of the newly renovated station in the northern city of Novi Sad collapsed on Nov. 1, 2024 in a disaster widely blamed on corruption and poor oversight. It sparked a wave of student-led protests and led to the resignation of then-Serbian prime minister Milos Vucevic and the fall of his government. The public prosecutor’s office in Novi Sad opened an investigation into the accident and deaths. In February, the public prosecutor’s office for organized crime opened another probe into
RISING RACISM: A Japanese group called on China to assure safety in the country, while the Chinese embassy in Tokyo urged action against a ‘surge in xenophobia’ A Japanese woman living in China was attacked and injured by a man in a subway station in Suzhou, China, Japanese media said, hours after two Chinese men were seriously injured in violence in Tokyo. The attacks on Thursday raised concern about xenophobic sentiment in China and Japan that have been blamed for assaults in both countries. It was the third attack involving Japanese living in China since last year. In the two previous cases in China, Chinese authorities have insisted they were isolated incidents. Japanese broadcaster NHK did not identify the woman injured in Suzhou by name, but, citing the Japanese
RESTRUCTURE: Myanmar’s military has ended emergency rule and announced plans for elections in December, but critics said the move aims to entrench junta control Myanmar’s military government announced on Thursday that it was ending the state of emergency declared after it seized power in 2021 and would restructure administrative bodies to prepare for the new election at the end of the year. However, the polls planned for an unspecified date in December face serious obstacles, including a civil war raging over most of the country and pledges by opponents of the military rule to derail the election because they believe it can be neither free nor fair. Under the restructuring, Myanmar’s junta chief Min Aung Hlaing is giving up two posts, but would stay at the
YELLOW SHIRTS: Many protesters were associated with pro-royalist groups that had previously supported the ouster of Paetongtarn’s father, Thaksin, in 2006 Protesters rallied on Saturday in the Thai capital to demand the resignation of court-suspended Thai Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra and in support of the armed forces following a violent border dispute with Cambodia that killed more than three dozen people and displaced more than 260,000. Gathered at Bangkok’s Victory Monument despite soaring temperatures, many sang patriotic songs and listened to speeches denouncing Paetongtarn and her father, former Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, and voiced their backing of the country’s army, which has always retained substantial power in the Southeast Asian country. Police said there were about 2,000 protesters by mid-afternoon, although
RSS