Most Earth-like planet yet found in Kepler data

Science : By looking for dips in the brightness of stars in a small region of the Milky Way, NASA’s Kepler mission has identified more than 4000 candidate exoplanets. This week, at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle, Washington, Douglas Caldwell of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, and his colleagues announced that they have identified eight more potentially habitable exoplanets. The team developed a statistical technique to eliminate false positives and applied it to a list of 12 Kepler candidates believed to be rocky worlds with radii less than 2.7 times Earth’s and in their parent star’s habitable zone . Separately, the Kepler Science Office announced a new list of similar candidate planets, including one just 30% larger than Earth and having an orbit of 330 days, making it the most Earth-like exoplanet yet found. Caldwell’s team hopes to develop a program to examine the new list in bulk because the previous analysis took two years. A faster analysis will help narrow down estimates of how many stars have Earth-like planets. Current estimates range from 10% to 50%.