It may sound like something from a very special episode ofDoctor Who, but the Christmas planet is real. What’s more, it’s the most Earth-like world yet discovered.
The planet, more properly known as Kepler 22-b, was revealed to the world Monday via a press conference at NASA Ames Research Center. It is one of thousands of planets discovered outside our solar system via the Kepler space telescope — and the first one that is slap-bang in the middle of what astronomers (really) call the Goldilocks zone: not too hot, not too cold, just right for life.
So why call it the Christmas Planet? Because it took three snapshots for the telescope to determine Kepler 22-b was really there, and the snapshots had to happen 290 days apart (the length of 22-b’s year). The last of those three encounters happened during the 2010 holiday season — just hours before the NASA telescope came down with a blinding technical glitch.
“It’s a great gift,” said William Borucki, the telescope’s principal investigator, who came up with the seasonal name. “We were very fortunate to find it.”
Actually making our way to the Christmas Planet might take a little longer, however. It is some 600 light years away — that is, more than 600 years distant even if we could travel at the fastest speed the universe allows. And we wouldn’t know what to pack, since astronomers have yet to determine whether the planet is rocky, liquid or gaseous.
But we do know it’s about twice the size of Earth, and that the average surface temperature is a balmy 72 degrees Farenheit. More importantly, we now know for sure that planets other than ours exist in the habitable zones around their stars. For exoplanet astronomers gathered Monday at NASA’s Ames campus for a four-day conference, Christmas has indeed come early.
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