At the time, I was a graduate student at MIT studying the anthropology and history of science, in particular the men and women studying planets as close as Mars and as distant as the exoplanets Kepler was rapidly finding.

This discovery, more than offering a connection between life-forms, is much more about us connecting with what Earth is, as a place and as our home.Д®xoplanet astronomy flourished with the 2009 launch of Kepler, a space telescope dedicated to finding exoplanets. Another answer is that detecting a planet like ours capable of hosting life brings us one step closer to answering the ultimate question of whether or not we are alone in the universe - the end of our вЂњcosmic loneliness,вЂќ as the science reporter Dennis Overbye wrote in this paper.Д«ut todayвЂ™s announcement will not readily lead to contact with an intelligent alien. Why, then, do they still insist on categorizing this planet as Earthlike? Some fantasize that вЂњanother earthвЂќ could be a celestial refuge if we end up destroying our own. The astronomers are of course well aware of these dissimilarities. Standing on the surface, one would see not the familiar blue sky more likely, it would be an alien red. Although liquid water, that all-important life sustaining substance, might exist on the surface of this planet, its 11-day orbit and strong radiation would create a climate very different from EarthвЂ™s. The European Southern ObservatoryвЂ™s news release explains that Proxima Centauri, unlike the other two stars in its system, is a red dwarf, smaller and cooler than our sun.

This detection of a вЂњgoldilocksвЂќ planet so close to our own marks a significant achievement for exoplanet astronomy, the young field devoted to the search for and study of planets orbiting stars other than our sun. We discover hundreds of вЂњexoplanetsвЂќ every year, but this one is different: It orbits its star at just the right distance so that, in theory, itвЂ™s possible it could sustain life. Yesterday, the European Southern Observatory announced that astronomers have detected a planet the size of Earth orbiting our nearest star, Proxima Centauri.

Planet centauri transformation table