Earth’s Twin!

Astronomers have confirmed the existence of a planet in the”habitable zone” around star just like our Earth. Kepler 22-b, the planet, lies about 600 light years away and is about 2.4 times the size of Earth. Its temperature is about 22C. Till now it is the closest confirmed planet like ours. Though it is unknown that if the planet is made mostly of rock, gas or liquid. At the result announcement conference NASA’s Kepler team stated that it had spotted nearly 1,094 new candidate planets. They chose those planets with the help of their space telescope which is sensitive enough to see when a planet outdo in front of its host star. It can see that because it dimmed the star’s light by minuscule amount.

This telescope was designed to look at a preset swathe of the night sky which covers at about 150,000 stars. First it identifies these slight changes and then they are confirmed by further observations by this telescope and others in orbit and on earth.

This new planet maintains 15% less distance to its sun than our Earth where its sun puts out bout 25% less light which gives hope for existence of liquid water. The year of this planet have 290 days. The Kepler team waited for three passes of the planet before updates its status from "candidate" to "confirmed". More information can be find in NASA website

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