Second ‘Earth’ Found By NASA’s Kepler Telescope

These are exciting times for those of the scientific orientation, as NASA keeps pushing the frontier of space exploration.

After the recent New Horizons mission to Pluto, another exciting discovery has been made for science buffs.

The Kepler telescope has made new information available on several planets, as the search for extra terrestrial life continues. Amongst the planets sighted by the Kepler telescope is Kepler-452b, a planet with many characteristics similar to our own earth- dubbed ‘Earth 2.0’.

Kepler-452b is located 1,400 light-years from us. It orbits a star that is 4% more massive and 10% brighter than our Sun. The planet itself is 1.6 times the size of Earth – making it a super-Earth – but the scientists are fairly sure that it is a rocky world, owing to its size and the type of star it orbits.

Its orbit, 384.84 Earth days and 5% more distant than our planet is from the Sun, places it right in its star’s habitable zone, where it is not too hot or cold for liquid water to form: the same region Earth is in around the Sun.

Even more, it orbits a sun very much like our sun. Since space exploration began, no planet that shares such similarities with earth has ever been found.

The search for extraterrestrial life continues, but with every ‘earth’ like planet found, we come ever closer to discovering we are not really alone in this universe.