Starting a new life on a distant planet is the dream of science fiction fans.
Now it seems there’s more chance of finding an inhabitable world outside our solar system.
Scientists have discovered a new planet which they believe is the most ‘Earth-like’ yet.
Kepler 438b, which orbits a dwarf star every 35 days, is thought to have mild enough temperatures to sustain running water, despite being 40 per cent warmer than the Earth.
However, the bad news is that it is much too far away to ever visit.
At 470 light years from Earth, it would take a spacecraft travelling at the speed of light 470 years to reach it.
The Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in the US, which made the discovery, believes the planet has a rocky surface, along with rivers and seas – the two most important factors to support life.
The discovery was announced at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle this week.
A further seven smaller planets were found that also lie within habitable temperature zones – not too close to their stars, but not too far away.
All eight were discovered using NASA’s Kepler space telescope, which is used to detect planets moving across the face of their stars by tracking the slight dimming of light.
The information was then used with a computer program called Blender, which confirmed the sightings of the new planets as genuine.
This further check is required because the NASA telescope can sometimes make false sightings if pairs of stars lying behind the one being studied eclipse each other, causing the light to dim.
The scientists said a second planet, Kepler 442b, was also somewhat similar to Earth – with a 60 per cent chance of being rocky. This planet is 1 100 light years away from ours.
Guillermo Torres, lead author of the study, said Kepler 438b – and possibly Kepler 442b – were the “most Earth-like yet found beyond our solar system”.
Both are thought to have temperatures between freezing and 60C (140F).
To be in the habitable zone – also known as the ‘Goldilocks zone’ – a planet must not be too hot nor too cold, and receive roughly as much sunlight as the Earth. Too much heat and any water on the surface would boil away as steam. Too little, and it would freeze.
Daily Mail