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posted by cmn32480 on Friday July 24 2015, @09:16AM   Printer-friendly
from the when-are-we-gonna-invent-the-warp-drive dept.

NASA has announced today the discovery of Kepler-452b, an Earth-like planet in a Sun-like star's habitable zone:

Kepler-452b is 60 percent larger in diameter than Earth and is considered a super-Earth-size planet. While its mass and composition are not yet determined, previous research suggests that planets the size of Kepler-452b have a good chance of being rocky.

While Kepler-452b is larger than Earth, its 385-day orbit is only 5 percent longer. The planet is 5 percent farther from its parent star Kepler-452 than Earth is from the Sun. Kepler-452 is 6 billion years old, 1.5 billion years older than our sun, has the same temperature, and is 20 percent brighter and has a diameter 10 percent larger.

The Kepler-452 system is located 1,400 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus.


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Thexalon on Friday July 24 2015, @01:46PM

    by Thexalon (636) on Friday July 24 2015, @01:46PM (#213142)

    The thing is, we found one much closer to home already: Venus. It has a similar size to Earth, at one point had extensive liquid water, and quite possibly life. Then a runaway greenhouse effect happened about 600 million years ago, and probably killed anything that was alive down there.

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  • (Score: 3, Funny) by Geotti on Friday July 24 2015, @05:53PM

    by Geotti (1146) on Friday July 24 2015, @05:53PM (#213232) Journal

    and probably killed anything that was alive down there.

    Everything? No. A highly advanced humanoid species known as amazons manned a spaceship and flew a few million kilometers to the next planet, where they discovered animals quite similar to them in their DNA structure. The girls genetically reengineered some of them to more closely resemble themselves (mostly for their amusement), the rest is history.