A second Earth? NASA scientists find planet similar to ours that may have liquid water

NASA scientists found a planet that looks a lot like Earth — and it’s giving them hope for a “second Earth.”

NASA announced Wednesday that scientists discovered an Earth-sized exoplanet orbiting a star where a rocky planet could have liquid water on its surface, according to a news release.

“Scientists discovered this planet, called Kepler-1649c, when looking through old observations from Kepler (a space telescope), which the agency retired in 2018,” NASA said in the news release. “While previous searches with a computer algorithm misidentified it, researchers reviewing Kepler data took a second look at the signature and recognized it as a planet.”

The planet -- located 300 light-years from Earth -- is the most similar to Earth in size and estimated temperature that Kepler has ever found, according to the news release. It’s only 1.06 times bigger than Earth, and its temperature could be very similar to Earth as well.

The biggest difference between the exoplanet and Earth is that the exoplanet orbits a red dwarf, which is known for stellar flare-ups, according to NASA. Those stellar flare-ups could make it hard for any potential life to survive on the planet.

“This intriguing, distant world gives us even greater hope that a second Earth lies among the stars, waiting to be found,” Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington, said in the news release. “The data gathered by missions like Kepler and our Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite [TESS] will continue to yield amazing discoveries as the science community refines its abilities to look for promising planets year after year.”

Scientists don’t know what the exoplanet’s atmosphere is like, and the planet’s estimated size has significant margins of error, according to NASA. Even with those uncertainties, scientists say the planet is still an amazing discovery.

“The more data we get, the more signs we see pointing to the notion that potentially habitable and Earth-size exoplanets are common around these kinds of stars,” Andrew Vanderburg, a researcher at the University of Texas at Austin, said in the news release. “With red dwarfs almost everywhere around our galaxy, and these small, potentially habitable and rocky planets around them, the chance one of them isn’t too different than our Earth looks a bit brighter.”

This story was originally published April 16, 2020 at 10:41 PM with the headline "A second Earth? NASA scientists find planet similar to ours that may have liquid water."