Five potential Earth-sized planets that may support liquid water — and so possibly life — have been found by NASA's Kepler mission.All five orbit the habitable zone — the region around a star where the temperature is just right for the existence of liquid water — of stars that are smaller and cooler than the sun, NASA announced at a news conference Wednesday. Liquid water could make it possible for life as we know it to exist on those planets.
However, follow-up observations are needed to verify that the signals observed by the Kepler space telescope are actual planets, the U.S. space agency cautioned in a news release.
NASA released new data Wednesday from the telescope on more than 1,000 possible new planets outside our solar system — more than doubling the count of what astronomers call exoplanets.
They haven't been confirmed as planets yet, but some astronomers estimate that 90 per cent of what Kepler has found will eventually be verified.
Overall, Kepler found 54 potential planets around the habitable zones of several stars, although most are at least double the size of Earth.
The telescope has been searching 156,000 stars in its field of view — about 1/400th of the sky — for signs of planets since September 2009.
"The fact that we've found so many planet candidates in such a tiny fraction of the sky suggests there are countless planets orbiting sun-like stars in our galaxy," said William Borucki of NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., the mission's science principal investigator.
5 possible Earth-like habitable planets found
