NASA: Earth twin discovered that revolves around its sun, with a “habitable zone” – Il Sole 24 Ore

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This article was published on July 23, 2015 at 18:29.
The last change is the July 23, 2015 at 19:16.

found another Earth? Hard to say at the time, but certain that the planet found by NASA with its Kepler satellite to only 1400 light-years away, so close, is a good candidate: revolves around a star much like our Sun, though older a billion years, 385 days, compared to our 365, and is only 60% greater than our planet, so comparable although there peseremmo much more.

But what intrigues most in the discovery of K 452b, that the provisional name of the newly discovered planet, is that would be in the habitable part of his solar system, as we do, and this is rare and important.

The situation is actually simple: it is thought to be habitable today that a planet must be sufficiently distant from its star mother for not literally be burned, as in the case of our Mercury close to the Sun, and at the same time It should not be too far away, since even the low temperatures impede the life. There must in essence be the possibility for water to remain liquid.

The conditions for the presence of life are many, but those on the dimensions, similar to the terrestrial ones which provide, for example, the presence of a stable atmosphere, and on the distance from the parent star, because of the right temperature for oceans, are preliminary to every other consideration, and in this case it seems that we are.

The fact that the new planet receives from its Sun 10% more than the Earth receives from her does not seem a problem, because of the greater size.

The announcement was made at a press conference today at NASA 18 hours Italian, along with the news that were found 500 other possible planets around other star, even if they are not comparable to our Earth.

In this ruthless hunter of “other worlds”, Kepler Nasa, he has in his game bag the tune of 4175 planets discovered, of course, be confirmed with accurate observations and prolonged the ground. To specify that the satellite can not see directly the planets around other stars, but finds them noticing mini eclipse when the planet rotating around its parent star, walks the line of sight between us and the star in question. So who knows how many we do not see because not every pass between ni and the star it deserves.

However, the 150,000 stars that Kepler is looking constantly since 2006 the planets abound as we have seen, and many more will be found. Some smaller, like our Earth, are very difficult to see because the effect they cause and minimum, but in this case we were lucky. As for the number, the stars examined appear to many, and are a huge number for us, but we think that in our own galaxy, the Milky Way, the stars there are at least 100 billion.

So far, the possible candidates to be the new Earth there were a dozen, but K 451B beats them all and salt in top of the list.

Scientists can not say any more, mind you, or if there is water on this world or life or atmosphere, but certainly at this point will let loose the observations of many scientists with other instruments to understand what it is, if the dream of a twin world can be represented by the new discovery. See you soon, hopefully, confirmation.

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