Telescope Confirms 'Earth 2.0'

Would make for a great vacation planet if it was 600 light years closer.

Researchers have confirmed the existence of the most Earth-like planet to date. However, "Earth 2.0" happens to be 600 light years away, so it doesn't exactly make a great back-up for when we inevitably go medieval on the Earth's backside. The team that operates the Kepler space telescope says that the planet, Kepler 22-b, is about twice the size of Earth, an average temperature of 22 C (for the record, that's just about perfect), and an orbit that takes 290 days to get around the Kepler 22 star. The planet's in the Kepler 22 system's "Goldilocks zone", where it's close enough to the sun to have liquid water, but not close enough to turn the planet to an uninhabitable wasteland. We also don't know if the planet is gaseous, solid, icy, watery, rocky, or what have you. Kepler 22-b is one of the first planets confirmed by the Kepler telescope crew. Another 2,325 candidate planets have also been spotted by the telescope, although only 10 of those have been confirmed to exist in habitable zones.

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