Kepler 438b was discovered by the Kepler Space Observatory in, January 2015, which detects planets as they move across the faces of their stars, causing the light picked up by the telescope to dim periodically by a minuscule amount. It is often stated that this is the most earth like Planet discovered thus far. We have an index of measuring this. Typically of Astrophysicists it is obviously named the Earth Similarity Index. If a Planet receives an index rating of 0 then it is nothing like earth. However if the planet gets a rating of 1 then it is identical in every way to earth. Kepler 438b received an Earth Similarity Index of 0.88!
It is located 470 light years away. This means that every image that we have of Kepler 438b is 470 years old. It has a star which it orbits. In fact it’s close proximity with its star puts it in the “Goldilocks Zone”. In essence this means that it is not too far away and not too close to its sun meaning that it could support life. Liquid water, essential for life, occurs in all the planetary objects that inhabit the Goldilocks Zone.
Kepler 438b completes an orbit around its star every 35 days, making a year on the planet pass 10 times as fast as on Earth. Small planets are more likely to be rocky than huge ones, and at only 12% larger than our home planet, the odds of Kepler 438b being rocky are about 70%, researchers said.
The scientists do not know if the planets have atmospheres, but if they are cloaked in insulating layers of gas, the mean temperatures of Kepler 438b are expected to be about 60 and zero degrees Celsius respectively.
The Harvard-Smithsonian team used a computer program called Blender to confirm that the planet originally spotted by the Kepler space telescope were real. False sightings can happen when pairs of stars that lie behind the one being studied eclipse each other, causing the background light to dim slightly. In some cases, this can be mistaken for a planet moving in front of its star.
The Blender program gives a statistical probability that the planet is real and not an effect of background stars eclipsing one another. Of 12 suspected planets Torres and his colleagues assessed with the program, 11 came out at more than 99.7% likely to be real.
Astronomers are keenly waiting on the next generation of telescopes, including Hubble’s replacement, the James Webb Space Telescope, and the European Extremely Large Telescope, which is being built in the Atacama desert in Chile, to help them examine the atmospheres of distant planets for signs of life.
beyond the Edge of reason 