Kepler-186f: First Earth-Size Planet In The ‘Habitable Zone’ Discovered by NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope

While NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope has uncovered an unbelievable number of planets outside of our solar system in recent years, today’s discovery of a planet dubbed Kepler-186f is the first Earth-size planet found orbiting a star in the “habitable zone” like our Earth does.

This “habitable zone” is the range of distance from a star where liquid water might pool on the surface of an orbiting planet. Lending itself to a very strong possibility for the potential for life to form on this new exo-planet.

In its announcement, NASA stated that “the discovery of Kepler-186f confirms that planets the size of Earth exist in the habitable zone of stars other than our sun.”

“The discovery of Kepler-186f is a significant step toward finding worlds like our planet Earth,” said Paul Hertz, NASA’s Astrophysics Division director at the agency’s headquarters in Washington. “Future NASA missions, like the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite and the James Webb Space Telescope, will discover the nearest rocky exoplanets and determine their composition and atmospheric conditions, continuing humankind’s quest to find truly Earth-like worlds.”

As the name suggests, Kepler-186f is one of several planets, along with, Kepler-186b, Kepler-186c, Kepler-186d, and Kepler-186e, which orbit a red dwarf or M dwarf star about 500 light-years from earth.

Kepler-186f orbits its sun once every 130-days. Standing on the planet, its sun would appear much dimmer than ours – much like our sun about an hour before sunset, at mid-day on Kepler-186f.

“Being in the habitable zone does not mean we know this planet is habitable. The temperature on the planet is strongly dependent on what kind of atmosphere the planet has,” said Thomas Barclay, research scientist at the Bay Area Environmental Research Institute at Ames, and co-author of the paper. “Kepler-186f can be thought of as an Earth-cousin rather than an Earth-twin. It has many properties that resemble Earth.”

The team as NASA Ames, responsible for Kepler’s ground system development, mission operations, and science data analysis, will continue in their efforts to find true Earth-twins — Earth-size planets orbiting within the habitable zone of a sun-like star.

Using the Kepler Space Telescope, the team is able to continuously measure the brightness of more than 150,000 stars. This is NASA’s first mission capable of detecting Earth-size planets around stars like our sun, allowing the researchers to measure their chemical compositions.

More details available online from: http://www.nasa.gov/kepler