Excerpt
SPENCER MICHELS (Newshour): More than 20 years ago, space scientist William Borucki dreamed up a plan to explore our galaxy to find the extent of life, if there is any, beyond the Earth. It was a daunting and expensive challenge.
This week, and $600 million later, at a conference of his peers in Mountain View, Calif., Borucki and NASA announced they had found the first planet in the habitable zone. That means what's being called the Goldilocks planet is just right, orbiting its star at the proper distance to have water, necessary for life.
Similar to Earth, though bigger, scientists say the temperature averages about 72 degrees -- 600 light years away, it orbits its own sun every 290 days. Borucki and his team found it using the Kepler space telescope, which was launched three years ago and remains in orbit around the sun.
He calls it a giant camcorder which was designed specifically to look for planets where life might be possible, and at the stars they orbit, 150,000 of them, much like our own sun.
No comments:
Post a Comment