For the first time, astronomers using NASA's Kepler space telescope have confirmed a roughly Earth-size planet orbiting a sun-like star in the so-called "Goldilocks" zone where water can exist in liquid form on the surface and conditions may be favorable for life as it is known on Earth.
Along with the confirmed extra-solar planet, one of 28 discovered so far by Kepler, researchers today also announced the discovery of 1,094 new exoplanet candidates, pushing the spacecraft's total so far to 2,326, including 10 candidate Earth-size worlds orbiting in the habitable zones of their parent stars.
Additional observations are required to tell if a candidate is, in fact, an actual world. But astronomers say a planet known as Kepler-22b, orbiting a star some 600 light years from Earth, is the real thing.
Full Article... Of course, finding planets as small as Earth, or even twice as big as Earth, is tricky work and I'm by nature skeptical of "big new discoveries". But if this news pans out, it is definitely exciting. And if we can confirm the existence of even one other planet that's remotely similar to something that could support life as we know it, it's pretty likely that there are also other such worlds--and the likelihood of extraterrestrial life grows. And maybe, just maybe, some kind of life evolved into something approximating our idea of intelligence (although whether such intelligence has even evolved on Earth is a matter of debate among some people).
It's always important to remember, though, that all of this is a long string of maybes and a heck of a lot of conjecture, much like the famed Drake Equation (for which you can't plug in any values that aren't outright guesses). Then, there's that pesky
Fermi Paradox...