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Hunt for Earth's alien twin reaches at 'Goldilocks-zone' planet,

life possible in distant solar system
By FnF Desk | PUBLISHED: 18, Apr 2014, 11:23 am IST | UPDATED: 18, Apr 2014, 11:26 am IST

Washington: The hunt for Earth's alien twin reached a new milestone with the discovery of a faraway planet that’s similar in
size to our globe and has the right temperature to potentially support liquid water — and possibly life.

The planet, called Kepler-186f, is the first Earth-size sphere outside our solar system with an orbit around its star that is in the
'Goldilocks zone' — the habitable range that is neither too hot nor too cold.

Researchers say the planet may meet what they believe are two basic requirements for life. Being close to Earth’s size
increases the chances that the planet has a rocky, rather than gaseous, surface. And because it gets the right amount of
stellar radiation, Kepler-186f is able to support liquid water, as opposed to ice or vapor.

“We don’t fully understand what makes a planet habitable, so we look for what we know,” said theoretical astrophysicist Brad

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Hansen of
UCLA, who
was not
involved in
the finding.
“The basic
assumption
is that you
need to
have a rocky
surface to
stand on
and liquid
water for life
to use.”

Using data
gathered by
NASA’s
Kepler
space-
based

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telescope,
the team of
astronomers
discovered a group of five planets orbiting a star 500 light-years from Earth. The star, called Kepler-186, is a relatively cool
red dwarf about half the size of our sun. Four of the planets venture extremely close to the star, making them too hot for
liquid water — and therefore, life as we know it. But the outermost planet soaks in just enough energy for surface water to
stay liquid.

Last year, the Kepler spacecraft discovered three exoplanets, all larger than Earth, within the habitable zone of two different
stars. One of the exoplanets, Kepler-62f, is 40 percent larger than Earth and previously held the record for the habitable
exoplanet that is closest to the size of our planet. The newly found Kepler-186f set a new record by being only 10 percent
larger than Earth.

“We thought it was special when we first saw the little blip in the data,” said study author and astronomer Elisa Quintana of
the SETI Institute. The findings were published online Thursday in the journal Science.

To find Kepler-186f, Quintana and her colleagues sifted through the mounds of data gathered by the telescope as it
scrutinized one patch of the sky continuously for four years, looking for signs of planets outside our solar system.

Because the telescope can’t see exoplanets directly, astronomers use a technique called the transit method to infer their
presence. The light intensity from a star will normally read as continuous and flat, but if a planet passes between the
telescope’s field of view and that star, it will block some light and show up as a dip in the data.

So Kepler-186f may be close to the Earth in size, but is it truly Earth’s twin? Most likely, no.

For one thing, the planet is colder than Earth. The amount of stellar energy it receives is only a third of the energy that the
Earth gets from the Sun.

“This planet actually receives less warmth than Mars does,” said astronomer David Kipping at the Harvard-Smithsonian
Center for Astrophysics, who was not involved in the study.

Also, the transit method provides information about a planet’s size — but not about its mass.

“Because you don’t get the mass, you don’t know if it’s a big rock, or a small rock with a big, gaseous atmosphere,” Hansen
said.

While a smaller radius does mean Kepler-186f has a higher probability of having a rocky rather than gaseous surface,
scientists at this point can only speculate about its physical composition.

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Tidal locking — when a planet orbits with the same side always facing its star — has not been ruled out for Kepler-186f. The
absence of a day-night cycle wouldn’t rule out life entirely, but it would make for a world very different from ours.

“It would have one sunny side and the other would be permanently dark, meaning it wouldn’t have an Earth-like climate,” said
atmospheric scientist James Kasting of Penn State University, also not a part of the Kepler team.

Quintana says that the planet is “more of an Earth cousin” than a twin — but experts seem to agree that further composition
analysis of bodies like Kepler-186f is a necessary next step to find out what these Earth-like exoplanets are really like.

“Earth-like planets are very common — they’re actually all over the place,” said Kipping. “Now we just need to find the closest
one.”

In 2017, NASA will launch the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), which will use an array of wide-field cameras to
identify nearby exoplanets for further mass, composition and atmospheric analysis. The James Webb Space Telescope.
scheduled to be launched in 2018, will serve as the fine-toothed comb that measures the physical and chemical properties of
those planets to assess the potential for life.

But some scientists argue that the transit method, which TESS will also use, has drawbacks. In some ways, it requires a
happy accident to work — the planet has to be aligned edge-wise along the observer’s line of sight, passing between the
observer and the star. A tighter orbit around the star or a larger planet-to-star size ratio can increase the probability of seeing
the characteristic dip in light values.

But this leaves many exoplanets and star systems largely undetected. For instance, even Earth itself — given its distance
from the Sun and comparatively small size — would likely not be easy to spot using the transit method from afar. #Source:
Washington Post

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