First Earth-sized exoplanets found!

NASA reports that the Kepler mission has discovered the first Earth-sized exoplanets ever discovered. What’s even wilder: they found the pair of them in the same damned system.

Kepler 20f, Venus, Earth, and Kepler 20e arranged in size order from smallest to biggest


Size comparison nicked from Bad Astronomy. An artist’s impression of the relative size differences of the two planets and ours. Note that Kepler was actually able to detect a planet smaller than Venus. That’s something!

From NASA:

The Kepler-20 system includes three other planets that are larger than Earth but smaller than Neptune. Kepler-20b, the closest planet, Kepler-20c, the third planet, and Kepler-20d, the fifth planet, orbit their star every 3.7, 10.9 and 77.6 days. All five planets have orbits lying roughly within Mercury’s orbit in our solar system. The host star belongs to the same G-type class as our sun, although it is slightly smaller and cooler.

The system has an unexpected arrangement. In our solar system, small, rocky worlds orbit close to the sun and large, gaseous worlds orbit farther out. In comparison, the planets of Kepler-20 are organized in alternating size: large, small, large, small and large.

This throws a bunch of things we thought we understood about planetary formation on their ear. Either our idea that rocky worlds tend to be inner planets with the gas giants further out is wrong, or we’ve found an outlier. More data needed!

This comes hot on the heels of Kepler’s last landmark find: a super-Earth in a star’s habitable zone.

Why should you care? you ask, impertinently. Well, the very existence of exoplanets pretty much proves the weak anthropic principle, which serves as a very convenient and very devastating club with which to whack theists who use the fine-tuning argument. Not to mention what it does to astrologers’ ideas about planets governing and/or predicting people’s lives!

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First Earth-sized exoplanets found!
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3 thoughts on “First Earth-sized exoplanets found!

  1. 1

    This is why I often check Bad Astronomy first thing in the morning. I love news like this to start my day!

    Dr. Tyson has some things to about fine tuning, a stupid idea if ever there was one.

  2. 2

    My objection to the fine tuning argument is the argument assumes the Earth is fine tuned to support humans, rather than humans being fine tuned to live on Earth.

    I’ve never liked either anthropic principle. The weak anthropic principle is a tautology, basically saying if things were different then things would be different. The strong anthropic principle should be renamed the strong egotistical principle: “The universe exists solely to produce me.”

  3. 3

    This is super-cool, and why I love space science – the possibility of new, unexplored worlds out there.

    It’s the same reason I enjoy marine sciences: to explore a world nobody’s seen ever before. The chance to discover something nobody’s ever had a chance to before. To touch the stars…

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