Planets Like Earth Appear To Be Out There

Image from National Geographic

From Japan Times:

LONDON — The real wonder of our age is this. You can go on the Web, type in PlanetQuest New Worlds Atlas, or Extrasolar Planets Encyclopedia, or NASA Star and Exoplanet Database, and directly access the data on 340 new planets that have been discovered in the past five years.

That number is set to grow very fast now, for on March 6 The U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) successfully launched the Kepler telescope, which will find many more planets including potentially Earth-like ones. It will stare unblinkingly at an area of space containing about 100,000 relatively near stars, watching for the tiny dimming of a star that happens when one of its planets passes between the star and us.

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