Two new Earth-sized exoplanets discovered
Two new Earth-sized exoplanets discovered
Wed December 21st, 2011
Jennifer Chu, MIT News Office
Hunting for habitable worlds, NASA’s Kepler space telescope has unveiled two new planets, some 950 light-years away, that are the smallest yet detected, and the closest in size to Earth. In a paper published this week in Nature, scientists from MIT and elsewhere, among them PAOC's Sara Seager, report that the planets — one just about Earth’s size, and the other a bit smaller — likely have rocky compositions, similar to Earth, and orbit a star much like the sun. But that’s where the similarities end.
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