About 600 light-years from Earth, Kepler 22-b is not close to home, it doesn’t have
a very romantic name and while scientists are not yet sure if it is made mostly of
rock, gas or liquid, it does have similarities to our own – making it the latest best
potential for a life sustaining planet.
On Monday NASA said ithe Kepler space
telescope has confirmed its first-ever planet in a habitable zone outside our solar
system. Kepler-22b, initially glimpsed in 2009, is the first the US space agency has
been able to confirm.
“We’ve got a star that’s like the sun, with a planet
that is like earths size, in an orbit that is like earth’s orbit” says Br. Guy Consolmagno,
astronomer and planetary scientist at the Vatican Observatory. “All of this is telling
us that it could be a planet that has conditions, just the right amount of heat, just
the right amount of sunlight to make life possible and it’s the first one that we
have really got that matches all the details we are looking for”.
Confirmation,
AS Br. Consolmagno explains, means that astronomers have seen the planet crossing
in front of its star three times: “The Kepler Telescope is aimed at a specific and
very rich patch of stars to look for very slight variations in the starlight”. “They
have managed to see this [the star] dim and come back three times, they have got the
period down and they know what the mass of the star is because of the type of the
star, it is very similar to our sun, and the period of the variations is about 300
days, which is typical of an earth year. Plus, the amount that the star has dimmed
with this planet crossing in front of it they can figure out how big it is and only
about twice the radius of the earth”. Listen to Emer McCarthy’s full interview
with Br. Consolmagno: