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Kepler mission finds star with five Earth-sized planets

"Earth-size planets have formed throughout most of the Universe’s 13.8-billion-year history," researchers wrote.

By Brooks Hays
An illustration of Kepler-444 and its five Earth-size planets. Photo by Tiago Campante/Peter Devine.
An illustration of Kepler-444 and its five Earth-size planets. Photo by Tiago Campante/Peter Devine.

AMES, Iowa, Jan. 27 (UPI) -- Scientists working on the Kepler mission have confirmed the discovery of five new Earth-sized alien worlds, all orbiting the same star.

Since its launch in 2009, NASA's Kepler probe has located more than 1,000 exoplanets. And while every newly discovered exoplanet is exciting, the mission's ultimate end has always been to located Earth-like exoplanets. In that context, the latest planetary system is a goldmine -- sort of.

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While the newly discovered planets are all roughly the same size as Earth -- and likely to be dense, rocky spheres -- they're probably too hot to host life as we understand it.

Researchers at the University of Birmingham, in England, and Iowa State University confirmed the existence of five new Earth-like alien planets after examining data collected on the star Kepler-444. By parsing the dimming patterns (solar seismology) of Kepler-444, researchers we able to determine the relative size and orbits of the five confirmed planets.

The five planets are no smaller than Mercury and no larger than Venus, but they each orbit their host star -- a 11.2 billion-year-old star, 25 percent smaller that the sun -- in less than 12 days. The planets' closer proximity to their sun means they're each extremely hot, too hot to host life.

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Still, scientists say that with every new Earth-sized planet found, the odds of extraterrestrial life go up.

"This is one of the oldest systems in the galaxy," study co-author Steve Kawaler, an astronomy professor at Iowa State, said in a press release. "Kepler-444 came from the first generation of stars. This system tells us that planets were forming around stars nearly 7 billion years before our own solar system."

"We thus show that Earth-size planets have formed throughout most of the Universe's 13.8-billion-year history, leaving open the possibility for the existence of ancient life in the Galaxy," Kawaler and his colleagues wrote in their paper -- published this week in The Astrophysical Journal.

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