Kepler spots two Earth-like exoplanets

Nature : Two of five planets orbiting Kepler-62, a star located about 1200 light-years away, appear to be Earth sized and located in the system’s habitable zone, where water could exist in a liquid state. The planets were detected by NASA’s Kepler spacecraft, which was launched in 2009 to look for Earth-like planets orbiting other stars. According to William Borucki of NASA and his colleagues, who published the results of their work online yesterday in Science, Kepler-62e and Kepler-62f are probably solid and covered by oceans. The planets were detected by the way they blocked their star’s light as they passed in front of it. However, because the planets exert too small a gravitational pull on their parent star and are located too far away from the star for astronomers to use its light to hunt for chemical elements, the composition of the planets and their atmospheres remain to be determined.