NASA Finds ‘Earth’s Bigger, Older Cousin’

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For so many years  scientists have been trying to find a planet similar to Earth orbiting a different sun thousands of light years away. Though they discovered planets similar to Earth, some 20 years ago, but they were not of similar size to Earth nor were they orbiting a star similar to sun, and travelling in a habitable zone (which means the planet is at the right temperature to harbor liquid water).

This diagram shows the system of planets around the star Gliese 667C. A record-breaking three planets in this system are super-Earths lying in the zone around the star where liquid water could exist, making them possible candidates for the presence of life. This is the first system found with a fully packed habitable zone. The relative approximate sizes of the planets and the parent star are shown to scale, but not their relative separations.
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In a recent discovered, NASA spokesperson on Thursday said that its Kepler spacecraft has spotted “Earth’s bigger, older cousin”: the first nearly Earth-size planet to be found in the habitable zone of a star similar to our own. They are still not sure if there is life on that Kepler 452b.

Kepler 452b will forever be remembered as the first, second Earth or what NASA refers to as “Earth 2.0″ ever discovered:

Here’s what we know so far about this Earth 2.0:

  1. It’s 60% larger than Earth.
  2. It’s most likely rocky, meaning it has a solid surface as opposed to a gaseous one, like Jupiter.
  3. It’s about 1,400 light years from Earth.
  4. It orbits its star every 385 days, very similar to Earth’s orbital length.
  5. The planet and star it’s orbiting are about 6 billion years old – 1.5 billion years older than our sun.
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News Source – businessinsider

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