The newly found planets include two that are more similar to Earth than any other exoplanets found to date, astronomers said at a press conference Tuesday at the 225th American Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle, Wash.
“Most of these planets have a good chance of being rocky, like Earth,” astronomer Guillermo Torres, with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., said in a statement.
Torres and colleagues found the planets by analyzing data collected by NASA’s Kepler space telescope. The Earth-cousins include Kepler-438b, located about 470 light-years away, and Kepler-442b, located about 1,100 light-years from Earth. Kepler-438b has a diameter just 12 percent bigger than Earth and Kepler-442b is one-third larger.
The planets orbit so-called red dwarf stars, which are smaller and cooler than the sun.
“We don’t know for sure whether any of the planets in our sample are truly habitable,” said David Kipping, also with CfA. “All we can say is that they’re promising candidates.”
A computer analysis published last year, however, raises questions about whether red dwarf stars make for life-friendly planets.
The study suggests a planet situated relatively close to a red dwarf star would be pummeled by powerful radioactive stellar winds. Theoretically, only planets with a strong magnetic field or thick atmosphere may be capable of hosting life — at least life as it appears on Earth, physicist Ofer Cohen, also with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, told Discovery News last year.
The new research is being published in The Astrophysical Journal.
From Discovery News
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