Just as real-estate prices in parts of North America have started to get expensive again, NASA says it has confirmed for the first time the existence of an Earth-like planet that may hold liquid water.
The planet is Kepler-186f and was discovered with NASA’s Kepler telescope, originally launched in 2009 and recently crippled, but not before gathering enough data that researchers are still analyzing it and making discoveries like this.
Yes, this is kind of a big deal, as it’s the “first validated Earth-size planet in the habitable zone of another star,” as Elisa Quintana of the SETI Institute at NASA’s Ames Research Center explained in a press conference Thursday.
“Some people call these habitable planets, which of course we have no idea if they are,” San Francisco State University astronomer Stephen Kane, a member of the discovery team, said in a release. “We simply know that they are in the habitable zone, and that is the best place to start looking for habitable planets.”
via cnet
Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/T. Pyle
