We’re Totally Going To Set Up Kepler 186f With Earth

It is a bit bigger and somewhat colder, but a planet circling a star 500 light-years away is otherwise the closest match of our home world discovered so far, astronomers announced on Thursday.

The planet, known as Kepler 186f, named after NASA’s Kepler planet-finding mission, which detected it, has a diameter of 8,700 miles, 10 percent wider than Earth, and its orbit lies within the “Goldilocks zone” of its star, Kepler 186 — not too hot, not too cold, where temperatures could allow for liquid water to flow at the surface, making it potentially hospitable for life.

“Kepler 186f is the first validated, Earth-size planet in the habitable zone of another star,” Elisa V. Quintana of the SETI Institute and NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif., said at a news conference on Thursday. “It has the right size and is at the right distance to have properties similar to our home planet.”

EARTH, you stoked? Kepler186f is the right size, the right distance, it is the absolute best match we’ve found so far, and you certainly don’t have much time left to play the field anyway as we humans are about to end you. More about this George Michael/Maeby situation (Kepler 186f is actually perhaps best described as Earth’s “cousin”) at the New York Times.