Earth’s twin in space
The discovery of an earth-like planet days after an ambitious probe was launched to explore Mars is an exciting step forward for mankind’s space exploration. But for its size — two and a half times larger than us — and its shorter orbit around its own star, Kepler-22b could approximate many of the conditions of planet earth. The most fascinating part is its balmy temperature of 22ºC, quite like the weather of San Francisco, making it theoretically habitable.
As Star Trek fans would know, this is what Spock would call an M-class planet, where life forms can exist.
It will, of course, need much more information to know that for sure. There are 15 such potential “twins” of planet earth, and while this one’s sheer distance of 600 million light years makes it among the nearest and smallest relative to the others, we don’t really know anything about it. The quest is still in its nascent stages: besides astronomers and scientists, no one might get too moved by the discovery. Yet every such advance brings homo sapiens that much closer to finding the “Goldilocks” planet — neither too hot nor too cold — where we could either come across others, or indeed move there and set up colonies. Some might say mankind has sufficiently destroyed its own planetary home with pollution, pestilence and wars, and should leave the rest of the universe alone, but the human race is imbued with the spirit of exploration and will continue seeking newer worlds out there.
Post new comment