Kepler Discovers First Earth-Sized Exoplanets

"The planets, called Kepler-20e and Kepler-20f, are too close to their star to be in the so-called habitable zone where liquid water could exist on a planet's surface"

Zzzzzzz??? Really??

Twenty five years ago, finding an exoplanet was considered to be some forward looking science that might not ever happen, and the belief then was that planets were likely quite rare. Ten years ago we'd found some planets, but they were all gas giants.

Now, we find a planet which is close to Earth in size, in a solar system with 5 planets in it, 1000 light years away That's some heavy stuff.

If you're incapable of understanding that this is actually pretty significant, maybe you should go back to your coloring books... the estimate of the number of planets there are likely to be in our galaxy alone has likely gone up by several orders of magnitude in the last 20 years or so.

We're quickly changing from "oh there's likely not many planets" to "the universe is full of them"... it's hard not to think that even if it's not what we'd call intelligent life, there's likely more than a few places that have evolved some form of life.

The more we see stuff like this, the more we see just how vast and astounding the universe around us actually is.

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/NTEGkZ5lh1E/kepler-discovers-first-earth-sized-exoplanets

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