On Saturday the New York Times‘s Dennis Overbye had a hefty front page story, with a highly impressive graphic, describing the frustrating search for another star that hosts a planet of the right size and temperature to fit the too-long unfulfilled term “Earth-like planet.” He talks to a good-sized list of reliable sources. It’s a lively roundup, and spends a lot of its time sharing the suspicion among these experts that the odds for discovery of such a world as shrinking – certainly not however toward zero – even though the number of known extra solar planets keeps growing. Even longer by far are the odds, it says here, that any that sustain life will have led to civilizations of sentient beings, or anything beyond microbial slime.

Today, Bingo. The news is coming alive with reports of a new candidate world, called Kepler 22-b. It circles a G-type star not much different from our own Sun, about 600 light years away. Its diameter is gauged at 2.4 times that of Earth. It’s year is 290 Earth days long. Those are heady specs for those in the astrobiology field. It’s the best bet yet by far. The graphic top right, need one say, shows photos of four planets and an artist’s imagined illus of the new one. The clouds, seas, and bluish sky are the workings of hope.

Coverage thus far is scant; the news just broke this morning. Overbye’s story has more background than any of the fresh news coverage. That includes explanation why planets revealed by Kepler – which measures dips in starlight as planets cross in front of their suns as viewed from here – may be fine statistical hints to the abundance of planets and of those like our own. But the Kepler Telescope survey is focussed on a region too far away for close scrutiny by other means, including easy inference of planet density. An effort to get doppler data on the newly-reported discovery with other telescopes, one learns, will be tried next summer, presumably when the target star is in the night sky. The news may also hint why the first source in Overbye’s story, UC Berkeley’s Geoff Marcy, was so sure that something quite distinctly Earth-like was bound to pop up soon. As a key member of the Kepler team, he surely  knew what was about to break.

Maybe Overbye somehow knew, too? And this way he got the B-matter out of the way on Saturday, so he could write the bejabbers out of this new discovery for ScienceTimes? Nah. Well. Maybe.

Stories:

• AP – Seth Borenstein: NASA finds planet that could sustain life ; The quickie place holder. See updates for what he kept writing after this one went up.
• Washington Post – Bryan Vastag: Newest alien planet is just the right temperature for life ; The Kepler astronomers, based at the NASA Ames Research Center, he now seen the alien world cross its star’s face three times. So, one is quite sure, they’ve been keeping a big secret ever since the second one popped up in their data. This is a good sized story. It even includes that the SETI Institute’s Allen Array of radio telescopes near Lassen Peak, after being shuttered by lack of money, is back on now and will monitor Kepler-22.
• AFP – Kerry Sheridan : NASA confirms ‘super-Earth’ that could hold life ;
• Huff Post – Seth Shostak: Last Chance to Be Special ; Shostak is a writer-astronomer, and works for the SETI Institute. He provides a longer view than other stories out so quickly, recounting the history of doubt, then hope, and recently discovery of other solar systems.

*UPDATES:

• AP – Seth Borenstein: Planet in sweet spot for Goldilocks zone for life ; It’s wet, Borenstein’s sources are pretty sure, In fact, probably too wet for any land to stick out. So chances of a civilization that is easy to imagine sink in that alien sea. Primo planet sleuth Geoff Marcy was busy, with lots of quotes as the day went on. This one: The is a phenomenal discovery in the course of human history.” Yes, well, except perhaps for the element of surprise. Phenomenal might best be withheld for discovery of another atmosphere with chemistry so out of balance it’s gotta mean metabolism. But exciting indeed. Marcy went on that this shows “Homo sapiens are straining our reach into the universe to find planets that remind us of home. We are almost there.”
• USA Today – Dan Vergano : Earth-like planet discovered in ‘habitable’ zone ; Another Marcy-ism, presumably from the teleconference today. “This discovery is rock solid, even if the planet isn’t.” Best guess – rocky core, big ocean, dense atmosphere of Neptunian scale, a mass ten more more times Earth. Vergano also uses a quote much like one of the AP’s, but attributes it to an email from the Berkeley professor. Well of course – no sense composing one’s thoughts afresh for each query.
• New Scientist – Melissa Fellet: Smallest habitable world around sun-like star found  ; The story has necessary “could be” and other caveats. The hed runs beyond habitable zone all the way to habitable planet, which are not the same.
• Science News – Nadia Drake: Distant world looks ripe for life/ Planet hunt spots most Earthlike orb yet ; Well done, fully accurate, and lively. Have I mentioned (yes) she’s daughter of astronomer Frank ‘The Equation’ Drake, SETI guru?
• Time Magazine – Nick Carbone: NASA Find Planet in ‘Habitable Zone’ That Could Sustain Life ;
• Discovery News – Ian O’Neill: SETI to hunt for aliens on Kepler’s Worlds ; A bit more on the new planet just in time for a revived SETI Institute – Allen Array inspection from the foothills of the Northern Sierra.
• Space.com – Karl Tate: Planets Large and Small (Infographic) – Print out this beauty for the planet crazed kids, old and young, you might know. It is a vivid one, updated wtih Kepler 22b.
• Space.com – Mike Wall: A ‘major milestone’ in search for Earth’s twin ;
• Scientific American – Caleb A. Scharf: Kepler 22-b, Another step closer to finding Earth-like worlds ;
• Houston Chronicle – Eric Berger: Astronomers find planet in the “Goldilocks” zone ;
• Astronomy Now – Keith Cooper: Kepler finds planet in the habitable zone ;
• ScienceNOW – Govert Schilling: Potentially Earth-Like Planet Has Right Temperature for Life ; Schillings is among the astronomy writing old pros, and it shows in this deft blend of the new news and its backdrop – the growing catalog of stars with planets that Kepler is amassing and which got a major, large update yesterday with much more than planet 22b.
• Universe Today – Paul Scott Anderson: Kepler Confirms First Planet in Habitable Zone of Sun-Like Star ;
• Mountain View Patch – Claudia Cruz: Planet Found in ‘Habitable Zone’ 600 Light Years Away  ; Ms. Cruz gets the essence right for this story, a local one for her. But also shows how easily things can go just awry. One senses confusion (or a confused editor, of course) when she writes “Kepler uses an astronomical telescope, which they point at one star for an entire mission, to observe when planets transit across the surface of that star.” Oh to have been able to nudge the sentence to full sense. Keper IS the telescope and to say it is an astronomical telescope clarifies nothing, it points conitnuously at not one single but many thousands of stars (so yes, each one is stared at), and planets don’t quite transit the star’s surface but stand well away from it in our direction. So close. She should cover some more science. It’ll come.
• MSNBC Cosmic Log – Alan Boyle : Alien planets get pigeonholed ; A piece with perspective, later out and better dressed. Boyle folds the Kepler 22b news into the simultaneous release of the Habitable Expolanets Catalog pulled together by a team at a place the might merit a further story on small universities doing good things, the University of Puerto Rico and its Planetary Habitability Laboratory.

Grist for the Mill: NASA Press Release ; Kepler Mission Page ;

- Charlie Petit

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