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NASA's Kepler mission has discovered a new batch of verified exoplanets, including nine that are potentially habitable:
NASA's Kepler mission has verified 1,284 new planets – the single largest finding of planets to date. "This announcement more than doubles the number of confirmed planets from Kepler," said Ellen Stofan, chief scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "This gives us hope that somewhere out there, around a star much like ours, we can eventually discover another Earth."
Analysis was performed on the Kepler space telescope's July 2015 planet candidate catalog, which identified 4,302 potential planets. For 1,284 of the candidates, the probability of being a planet is greater than 99 percent – the minimum required to earn the status of "planet." An additional 1,327 candidates are more likely than not to be actual planets, but they do not meet the 99 percent threshold and will require additional study. The remaining 707 are more likely to be some other astrophysical phenomena. This analysis also validated 984 candidates previously verified by other techniques.
[...] In the newly-validated batch of planets, nearly 550 could be rocky planets like Earth, based on their size. Nine of these orbit in their sun's habitable zone, which is the distance from a star where orbiting planets can have surface temperatures that allow liquid water to pool. With the addition of these nine, 21 exoplanets now are known to be members of this exclusive group.
Also at NPR and The Register .
False Positive Probabilities For All Kepler Objects of Interest: 1284 Newly Validated Planets and 428 Likely False Positives (DOI: 10.3847/0004-637x/822/2/86)
(Score: 3, Informative) by maxwell demon on Wednesday May 11 2016, @02:10PM
According to Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] the closest confirmed exoplanet (which happens alos to be the closest potentially habitable one) is about 10.5 light years away. So if we manage to accelerate a probe to about 10.5% of the speed of light, we can reach it in the next 100 years (but will have to wait another 10.5 years to learn about it). Given that the a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_vehicle_speed_records#Speed_records_relative_to_the_Sun">fastest space probe ever reached 252,792 km/h (157,078 mph), which is just about 0.023% of the speed of light, I'd say unless we make enormous progress in space probe propulsion, the probability of reaching it in the next 100 years is, to a very good approximation, zero.
Now there are unconfirmed exoplanet candidates at Alpha Centauri, which is 4.3 light years away. So maybe if we are lucky, we have to improve space probe propulsion "only" by a factor of about 200 in order to have a visit in the next 100 years.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by legont on Wednesday May 11 2016, @10:45PM
Well, Yuri Milner [wikipedia.org] plans to do just that [nytimes.com]. He is mostly known for mail.ru, but also a big investor in all the usual suspects.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.