"Now, we won't have as tight error bars as we would otherwise have, and we won't have orbital periods out well beyond Earth's in terms of Earth-size planets," Jenkins said during a lecture last month at the SETI Institute.
This corrects an impression left by Howard's earlier paper that the frequency of Earth-size planets actually decreases below twice Earth's diameter.
Kepler 62's newfound worlds are not quite small enough to be considered strict replicas of Earth, but the results have strengthened the already strong conviction among astronomers that the galaxy is littered with billions of Earth-size planets, perhaps as many as one per star, and that astronomers will soon find Earth 2.0, as they call it — our lost twin bathing in the rays of an alien sun.
Petigura, E., Howard, A. & Marcy, G. Prevalence of earth-size planets orbiting sun-like stars.
After compiling and compressing a life of garbage, Ebbesmeyer found that the world's great oceanic gyres turn out to be singing a kind of earth-size harmony.
"This represents a significant step toward Kepler's goal of determining the frequency of Earth-size planets in the habitable zones of Sun-like stars," Dr. Holman said.
Although observations in recent years, particularly by NASA's Kepler planet-finding mission, have uncovered a bounty of Earth-size worlds throughout the galaxy, this one holds particular promise because it might someday, decades from now, be possible to reach.
"We learned from the NASA Kepler mission that our Milky Way Galaxy contains tens of billions of Earth-size planets at lukewarm temperatures, any of which might harbor life," said Marcy, who will run the optical SETI project at Lick.
Had Kepler survived for an extended mission, it would have obtained enough data to directly detect a handful of Earth-size planets in the habitable zones of G-type stars.
New research shows that the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope may have the potential to detect certain pollutants, specifically chlorofluorocarbons, in the atmospheres of Earth-size planets orbiting white dwarf stars.
Debra Fischer, a planet hunter from Yale, who was not part of the team, said, "This technological feat is incredibly important because it means that the detection of Earth-size planets at larger distances is technically possible".
