Harvard Gazette
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Astronomers announced today that they have found eight new planets in the Goldilocks Zone
of their stars, orbiting at a distance where liquid water can exist on
the planet’s surface. The discoveries double the number of small planets
(defined as those having a diameter less than twice the size of the
diameter of Earth) believed to be in the habitable zone of their parent
stars. Among these eight, the team identified two that are the most
similar to Earth of any known exoplanets to date. (An exoplanet is a planet that orbits outside of our solar system.)
“Most of these planets have a good chance of being rocky, like Earth,” says lead author Guillermo Torres of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) and an associate of the Harvard College Observatory.
The findings were announced in a press conference at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society.
The two most Earth-like planets of the group are Kepler-438b and
Kepler-442b. Both orbit red dwarf stars that are smaller and cooler than
our sun. Kepler-438b circles its star every 35 days, while Kepler-442b
completes one orbit every 112 days.
As with many Kepler discoveries, the newly found planets are distant enough to make additional observations challenging. Kepler-438b is located 470 light-years from Earth while the more distant Kepler-442b is 1,100 light-years away.
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