The Search for Earth’s Sister Planets Finds 706 New Candidates

According to SPACE.com, the Kepler Space Observatory, launched in March of 2009, has discovered 706 possible new planets.  This comes from an area of over 150,000 stars in a very tight patch of space in the Milky Way galaxy.

NASA’s Kepler spacecraft hunting for Earth-like planets around other stars has found 706 candidates for potential alien worlds while gazing at more than 156,000 stars packed into a single patch of the sky.

If all 706 of these objects pass the stringent follow-up tests to determine if they are actually planets, and not false alarms, they could nearly triple the current number of known extrasolar planets. They were announced as part of a huge release of data from the mission’s first 43 days by NASA’s Kepler science team this week.

NASA’s Kepler spacecraft hunting for Earth-like planets around other stars has found 706 candidates for potential alien worlds while gazing at more than 156,000 stars packed into a single patch of the sky.

If this holds, and is found to be relatively consistent, it means that billions, even trillions of planets exist in the known universe.  The chances of their not being life elsewhere in the universe becomes quite unthinkable.  Better yet, maybe there are planets out there that could harbor human life if we could ever find a way to get there.

At some point, the earth will become inhospitable to humanity as we currently exist, either by our own ignorance or when the sun finally swells up and swallows us whole like Pac-man in a diet of large dots.  There is some peace in the idea that we may be in our own power at some point in the future to colonize the universe.  Certainly not in our time, but we have to start somewhere.

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