The whole world will be watching a live stream conference as NASA reveals their findings about a potential new planet that is similar to our own today, Thursday July 23 at Noon EDT.
NASA Will Reveal Findings on New Planet Similar to Ours
NASA has big plans today as they are setting up a news conference regarding the newest discovery from the Kepler Space Telescope. Launched in 2009, the Kepler mission is devoted to finding planets within what scientists explain as the “habitable zone,” but to what the average space cadet can call the Goldilocks Zone.
Space enthusiasts are abuzz with gossip that the US space agency will be announcing a monumental find: a new earth-like planet in the Milky Way’s Goldilocks Zone that may be able to support life.
What is perhaps just as exciting as the new find is viewers can tune in LIVE as NASA streams the conference, uncovering what may be the most newsworthy astronomical discovery of the past decade.
Why the Goldilocks Zone is Important for New Earth-like Planets
All planets, by definition, must revolve around a star. If the planet is too close, it will be too hot for water to exist. Yet, if too far away, it will be too frigid for water to stay liquid. Just like in the popular children’s story Goldilocks, the conditions must be just right for a planet to support liquid water, which in turn would sustain the life that we know of.
However, the keywords in that previous sentence are “that we know of” because recent efforts proposed by NASA are interested in finding alien life.
Kepler Hunts for Exoplanets Like Earth That Can Sustain Life
Since launching only six short years ago, the Kepler telescope has been a huge success having discovered 1,028 planets and 4,661 candidate planets. Most of these exoplanets are giant, gaseous bodies similar to Saturn and Jupiter.
Only 11 planets qualify as being in the habitable, Goldilocks Zone with a size much smaller than the gas giants and relatively similar to Earth.
In a news update on the live stream page, NASA has all but spelled out that brink of the discovery: “Today, and thousands of discoveries later, astronomers are on the cusp of finding something people have dreamed about for thousands of years — another Earth.”
For most Internet theorists, even without watching the livestream today, that one sentence alone has changed the idea of a new planet that can sustain life from mere potential to definite reality.
