habitable planets found

uary 02, 2011 Possible Earth-sized, habitable planets found Feb. 2, 2011 Courtesy of NASA and World Science staff NASA’s Kep­ler space tel­e­scope seems to have dis­cov­ered five plan­ets that are about the size of Earth and could sup­port liquid water, the space agen­cy has an­nounced. Pre­vi­ously, as­tro­no­mers had re­ported only one or two plan­ets fit­ting si­m­i­lar de­scrip­tions, and these were es­ti­mat­ed to be some­what larg­er than Earth. A di­a­gram show­ing the dis­tru­bi­tion of plan­e­tary can­di­dates found so far by the Kep­ler tel­e­scope, color-coded by size. (Im­age cred­it: NA­SA/Wendy Sten­zel ) Although further tests are needed to verify the finds, “in one genera­t­ion we have gone from ex­tra­ter­res­tri­al plan­ets be­ing a main­stay of sci­ence fic­tion, to the pre­s­ent, where Kep­ler has helped turn sci­ence fic­tion in­to to­day's real­ity,” NASA Ad­min­is­tra­tor Charles Bolden said this week. They are part of sev­er­al hun­dred new plan­et can­di­dates iden­ti­fied in new Kep­ler mis­sion da­ta./.../