Five Earth-sized planets discovered in Milky Way

Five Earth-sized planets have been identified around a distant star in the Milky Way galaxy in a discovery that raises the possibility of eventually finding another rocky planet where water-based life may exist, scientists said.

All five planets are too close to their sun and too hot to harbour life but the fact that they were formed many billions of years ago when the galaxy was still young suggests that rocky, Earth-sized planets could be more ubiquitous than previously thought.

The planets in the distant solar system range in sizes between Mercury and Venus and were discovered by analysing data gathered by Nasa’s Kepler space telescope which has so far identified more than 4,000 planetary “candidates”, of which 1,013 have been confirmed as true planets.

The star around which the five exoplanets orbit is known as Kepler-444, located 117 light years away in the constellation Cygnus and Lyra. The star, which is 25 per cent smaller than the Sun, formed 11.2 billion years ago, less than 20 per cent of the age of the galaxy and long before the formation of the Sun… see more

source: Independent UK

Tags: Earth Sized Planets, Milky way, Science

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