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Number of Habitable Exoplanets Found by NASA's Kepler May Not Be So High After All
The tally of potentially habitable alien planets may have to be revised downward a bit. To date, NASA's prolific Kepler space telescope has discovered about 30 roughly Earth-size exoplanets in their host stars' "habitable zone" — the range of orbital distances at which liquid water can likely exist on a world's surface.
Or so researchers had thought. New observations by the European Space Agency's (ESA) Gaia spacecraft suggest that the actual number is probably significantly smaller — perhaps between two and 12, NASA officials said today (Oct. 26)
[...] Gaia's observations suggest that some of the Kepler host stars are brighter and bigger than previously believed, the officials added. Planets orbiting such stars are therefore likely larger and hotter than previously thought.
Also at NASA.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Thexalon on Tuesday October 30 2018, @06:19PM
That's what the "habitable zone" thing is supposed to be about: narrowing down where we should be looking for ETs. Since the one planet we know about that has life on it has lots of liquid water and that liquid water is essential to all life on that planet, exobiologists figured odds were better for life on planets where there could be liquid water. That means not too far away from the star (which leads to ice like Mars has), and not too close (which leads to no water like Mercury). It's of course not guarantee: Venus is also in the habitable zone, but any ETs there fried thanks to unchecked global warming.
This isn't the same thing as figuring out where we're going to colonize. Heck, we haven't even gotten people any further than our own largest moon, and even then we didn't stick around for long.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.