By Ed Downs

This month’s edition of Skies to Stars diverts from the personal experience of astronomy and takes a quick trip into the wonders of astrophysics.  The big guns at NASA are coming up with some pretty cool stuff that has been shaking up the scientific community.  From almost the beginning of recorded time, our feeble species has wondered, “are there other ‘Earths’ out there?”  Thanks to the Kepler, the Spitzer Space Telescopes and the U.S. portion of the European Space Agency’s Planck mission, that question is being answered. 

The Kepler Space Telescope looks for Earth-size planets in the habitable zone, the region in a planetary system where liquid water could exist on the surface of the planet orbiting around sun-like stars in our galaxy. The Spitzer Space Telescope provides the astronomical community with unique infrared images. Among its many duties is probing the atmospheres of planets beyond our sun. The bottom line is that over 2,300 “planet candidates” have now been discovered.  Some 400 of these planet candidates are presumed to be “Earth-like,” in that they are estimated to be similar to Earth size and in a favorable temperature zone that will support liquid water.  One of these candidates, Kepler 22b, is of particular interest and is known to occupy a habitable zone.  But the following information from a NASA press release is even more exciting because a planet, called 55 Cancri e, has been detected by the presence of its own light.