While NASA continues to search for more rocky planets outside of the solar system, they’re also still searching for Earth-like planets here in our own backyard. For example, Cygnus is one of our closest neighbors, from a galactic sense, and NASA has deployed the Kepler Space Telescope to study the Milky Way galaxy. As it turns out, the Kepler Space Telescope is pretty good; NASA has discovered 1200 rocky exoplanets in the constellation Cygnus, including 58 planets with Earth-like life-friendly orbits.
There’s only one problem: now you have to tell which exoplanets are simply rocks and which are actual planets.
Kepler basically measures how many objects of a certain size cross in front of the face of the star. Given Kepler has an accuracy rating of nearly 80 percent according to CalTech, it’s likely that most of these discoveries are actually planets, which means that Earth-like planet systems may be pretty common.
You can read more about the new discovery on CNN.com or click on the link below:
http://www.cnn.com/2011/US/02/02/nasa.kepler.planets/index.html?hpt=T2