Big news from the Kepler mission: more than 1200 potential planets have been found by the orbiting observatory!
This is incredible! Even though I was expecting a number like this, actually hearing it for real is stunning. In 15 years we’ve found about 500 planets orbiting other stars, but in the almost two years since Kepler launched it may have easily tripled that number! Now, to be careful: these are candidate planets, which means they have not been confirmed. But in most cases these look pretty good, and if these numbers hold up it indicates that our galaxy is lousy with planets. They’re everywhere.
And it gets better: of those planets found, 54 are in their stars’ habitable zones. Now, many of these are massive planets unlikely to be Earth-like, but the huge news is that five are near-Earth sized, and one is actually very close to Earth’s size!
If this pans out, then it implies there could be a million Earth-like planets in the Milky Way galaxy.
Holy Haleakala.
OK, so what’s the scoop here as far as science goes?
