Astronomers have been on a quest to find another planet that can support life ever since space travel became possible, and even before. Last week, astronomers announced that they had found three “super Earths.”
The three planets that were just discovered all have one thing in common. They are all much bigger than Earth, but small enough to potentially have rocky surfaces, and they all orbit just a single star, like Earth.
Last year, astronomers from six major centers, including NASA, Harvard and the University of Colorado, met at a conference to share discoveries about Earth like planets, and the search for extraterrestrial life. At that conference they agreed advances in technology enable us to be on the verge of being able to detect the presence of small, rocky planets, much like our own, around distant stars for the first time. Small rocky surfaced planets are considered the most likely habitats for extraterrestrial life.
Prior to the discovery last week, scientists had found as many as 300 planets orbiting a single star, but they were all giant planets composed of gases, similar to our own solar system’s Jupiter and Saturn.
"So far we've found Jupiters and Saturns, and now our technology is becoming good enough to detect planets smaller, more like the size of Uranus and Neptune, and even smaller," said one of the top planet hunters on this world, Geoff Marcy of the University of California, Berkeley.
"Being able to find three Earth-mass planets around a single star really makes the point that not only may many stars have one Earth, but they may very well have a couple of Earths," said Alan Boss, a planet formation theorist at the Carnegie Institution of Washington in Washington, D.C.
This discovery is very exciting for multiple reasons, but perhaps the most impelling reason for many is that this will spur scientists around the world to step up the search for extra-terrestrial life forms.
It is believed that an Earth’s "twin" will be found within our own galaxy sometime in the near future.
Resources: For more detailed information about the technology to make these discoveries, please read Nasa/Harvard teams say finding a second earth could happen anytime now
Photo credit: NASA / Goddard Space Flight Center.
WRitten by Shelby Bateson
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