Astronomers find planet nearly same size as Earth
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For the first time, scientists have found a planet beyond the solar system that not only is nearly the same size as Earth, but has the same proportions of iron and rock, a key step in an ongoing quest to find potentially habitable sister worlds.
The planet, known as Kepler-78b, circles a star that is slightly smaller than the sun located in the constellation Cygnus, about 400 light years away.
One light year, is the distance light, moving at 299,792 kilometers per second travels in a year, or about 10 trillion kilometers.
Kepler-78b was discovered last year with NASA’s now-idled Kepler space telescope.
Kepler detected potential planets as they circled in front of their parent stars, blocking a portion of light.
That measurement not only revealed that Kepler-78b was relatively small, with a diameter just 20 percent larger than Earth’s, but that it was practically orbiting on the surface of its host star.
While the planet’s presumably molten surface and searing temperatures make it ill-suited for life, two independent teams of astronomers in this week’s journal Nature reported that they came to the same conclusion: Kepler-78b has roughly the same density as Earth.
“To me this means that planets like the Earth are probably not all that uncommon,” said University of Maryland astronomer Drake Deming.
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