Comments

1
Where there's water, there might be life.

And where there's life, there might be beer.
2
Were there serious people saying potentially habitable, earth-sized planets couldn't exist? It happened once, why not twice in such a vast universe? Does this discovery really prove anything?
3
And all we need is a trans warp drive to get there. Great.
4

Can we determine if they have streetlights?
5
Good Morning Charles,
I read the piece in this morning's paper. Fascinating but it isn't exactly a replica of our beloved earth. It's more like a cousin. My understanding is it is a bit bigger. However, it apparently is in the "habitable zone" of that star. We'll find out more information about it to further confirm.

Sure wouldn't mind a photo of it. What's shown is an artist's conception.
6
@4 The odds of life being there are iffy in my mind. But even if likely, the odds that large brained creatures that need roads with lights seem astronomically small. We just appeared in a time spanning almost 14 billion years. That this planet evolved exactly the same way with exactly the same life at exactly the same time- zero chance of that.
7
@3 - And we might just build one. Probably not in our lifetime, but very possibly in that of our children.
8
Sure but how are the black people there being treated?
9
@2 Knowing that there must be planets that should be able to support life as we know it, in this incredibly vast universe, is not the same thing, scientifically, as being able to point to a bunch of them.
10
@2:

It isn't so much that astronomers didn't previously believe such planets existed, but simply that, until the confirmation of Kepler-186f we had no direct evidence that they DID exist. That's basically how science works: you posit the existence of something, then seek out evidence that supports your hypothesis. If you find it - yay, you win at science! If you don't - well, you've still learned something, even if it's only that perhaps the evidence you seek isn't going to be as easy to find as you thought it might.

What makes this particular discovery so significant is that we now have that evidence of at least one other planet in the entirety of the universe that is similar enough to our own in size, comparative distance from its parent star, etc., etc., that it might, like earth, provide the basic components for life. We don't yet know that such life actually exists, but now that we know what to look for - and where - we can improve our ability to identify similar planets, and the more of those we find (and personally, I have no doubt we WILL find more), the better our chances of eventually finding one that does contain some form of life.

It certainly won't be easy, and it may well take decades, even centuries perhaps before we can say definitively, "we now have proof that life is not unique to our own world". But every little piece of evidence we accumulate moves us ever so slowly in that direction. As the late Carl Sagan wrote in his novel "Contact", "small moves, Ellie. Small moves."
11
Kepler-186f?!

I don't know about you, but where I'm from, when we find an Earth-like planet orbitting a red sun, we call it Krypton.
12
Venus and Mars as also within our star's "habitable zone" and, well...
13
A nit to pick: Constellations are almost always not located in some specific place, as they are the projected positions of distant stars from our vantage point. The stars forming Cygnus range between 11 and 3200 light-years from earth.
14
@13 yeah the article inappropriately conflates position in the sky (where using constellations as a reference is very common, and doesn't otherwise imply any connection) and its distance.
15
@12:

Precisely why we need to find a lot more of these "earth approximate" planets before we can even begin to investigate whether any of them might actually support life or at least have the potential to do so. The evidence from Mars for example definitely points to there having been liquid water on the surface at some time in its history, but as crucial as that is to supporting life in some form, it alone isn't sufficient to make a definitive assertion that it ever actually did.
16
@11: They tend to get informal names. There's a star formally known as "HD 209458 b", a Hot Jupiter (also known as a Pegasid, a class of gas giants orbiting extremely close to their stars) that has been alternatively dubbed "Osiris" after the Egyptian god of the underworld.
17
The first sentence makes no sense, even Mudede sense which is a lower standard.
18
Needs an edit - the planet's in a star system 459 LY away. No constellation is located at a uniform distance from our solar system.
19
#1: I like the way you think.
20
If it's habitable lets send all the republicans there and they can create their own society without blacks, gays, hispanics and any other ethnic group that they hate. rush limbaugh can be their ruler and newt and his android wife can be the superintendant of whatever. Oh, and sarah palin would be their token vice ruler, but they would have to remove her voicebox.

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