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NASA has Found Another 20 Promising Planets for Humans to Colonize

Posted: Fri Nov 03, 2017 10:48 am
by Eli
An international team of scientists has found 20 more exoplanets that might support human life. If confirmed, this would push the number of known extrasolar planets thought to be capable of sustaining life, bringing the total number of known, habitable near-Earth-sized exoplanets to around 50.

The space telescope, Kepler, was launched in 2009 with the specific mission to find extrasolar planets. And scientists have used its data to confirm thousands of them. Kepler broke in 2013, but the area of space it recorded over the four years it was operational contained over 150,000 stars, so there’s still a lot of data to go through.

Scientists winnowed down to a list of 4,034 exoplanets with durations of orbit of between around 6 hours and 632 days. From that list, the team singled out 20 candidates most likely to have the characteristics necessary to sustain life and published their findings earlier this month on the arXiv preprint server. Read the Full story on QUARTZ.