NASA Finds 2 Earth-Size Planets

Two planets orbiting the star 950 light-years from Earth would be the smallest alien sides known, astronomers introduced Tuesday. One from the planets is really smaller than Planet, scientists say.
These types of planets, while roughly how big our planet Planet, are circling very near to their star, giving them hot temperatures that are likely too hot to aid life, researchers stated. The discovery, nevertheless, brings scientists one step nearer to finding a accurate twin of Earth which may be habitable.
"We've entered a threshold: For the very first time, we've been in a position to detect planets smaller compared to Earth around an additional star, " lead investigator François Fressin from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center with regard to Astrophysics in Cambridge, Bulk., told Space.com. "We proved that Earth-size planets exist around other stars like the sun, and most importantly, we proved that humanity is able to detect them. It's the beginning of an era."
To find out the new exoplanets, Fressin and their colleagues used NASA's Kepler room telescope, which noticed the actual tiny dips within the parent star's brightness once the planets passed before it, blocking a number of its light. This really is called the transit approach to planet detection. The researchers after that used ground-based observatories to verify that the exoplanets actually exist through measuring minute wobbles within the star's position brought on by gravitational tugs through its planets.
"These two new planets would be the first genuinely Earth-sized worlds which have been found orbiting the sunlike star, inch Greg Laughlin, an astronomer in the University of Ca at Santa Jones ho was not active in the new study, said within an email to Space.com. "For the past two decades, it has been clear that astronomers would eventually reach this goal, and so it's fantastic to learn that the detection has now been achieved.