A newly discovered exoplanet in a group of eight similar ones is the "most Earth-like alien world" ever spotted to date.
According to BBC News, the Kepler Telescope noticed the group of planets, but only three were potentially habitable. Of those three, one stuck out for being rocky and a bit warmer than the others.
Researchers associated with the discovery unveiled their findings at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle. They said Kepler 438b, the newly identified Earth-like exoplanet, has surpassed Kepler 186f as the most similar to Earth.
"And it's around a cooler [red dwarf] star... so your sky would look redder than ours does to us," Doug Caldwell, of the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute in California, told BBC News.
Kepler seeks out exoplanets by looking for "transits," which occur when the light from a host star dims when the planet passes in front of it. Based on the transits, the telescope can then determine how far it is from the star and therefore roughly guess if it is in the star's habitable zone.
"With further observation, some of these candidates may turn out not to be planets," Fergal Mullally, Kepler science officer, told BBC News. "Or as we understand their properties better, they may move around in, or even outside, the habitable zone."
While Kepler has been prolific in identifying Earth-like exoplanets, it is not perfect and far from it.
"From the Kepler measurements and the other measurements we made, we don't know if these planets have oceans with fish and continents with trees," Caldwell said. "All we know is their size and the energy they're receiving from their star.
"So we can say: Well, they're of a size that they're likely to be rocky, and the energy they're getting is comparable to what the Earth is getting."
