NASA's 'astonishing' find: 54 planets that can sustain human life
The space agency has identified dozens of planets that may be hospitable to earthlings. Could intelligent life be living on one of them?
How did scientists find the planets?
Kepler, an orbiting NASA telescope, has been gazing into a small section of sky near the Northern Cross. By measuring the brightness of the 156,000 stars that reside there, Kepler can detect whether planets are crossing the stars' paths. Kepler is able to detect much smaller objects than its predecessors, and a significant number of the planets it has found are only slightly bigger than Earth.
Astronomers said that it would take years to confirm that all of these candidates were really planets — by using ground-based telescopes to measure their masses, for example, or inspecting them to see if background stars are causing optical mischief. Many of them might never be vetted because of the dimness of their stars and the lack of telescope time and astronomers to do it all. But statistical tests of a sample suggest that 80 to 95 percent of the objects on it are real, as opposed to blips in the data.
http://video.theweek.com/video/Is-a-new-planet-on-the-way;Most-Recent-
Videos#c=2V86VM25KL5T3NN7&t=Is%20a%20new%20planet%20on%20the%20way?
