Discovery of the First Earth-Like, Habitable Exoplanet Will Be Announced in May of 2011 (Maybe)
Kepler's View at First Light NASA/Ames/JPL-Caltech The numbers are in, the data has been analyzed, and the date is now set: the discovery of an earth-like, habitable planet will be announced in May of next year. At least, that's the conclusion reached by two professors at Harvard and U. of California, Santa Cruz, whose mathematical projections say that given the current pace of exoplanet discoveries, the finding of a suitable planet for life is right around the corner. How does this math work exactly? The details, of course, are complicated and contain a lot of subscript variables and other mathematic acrobatics that we won't get into here (a PDF of Professors Samuel Arbesmans and Gregory Laughlins, of Harvard and Cal Santa Cruz respectively, is available here), but essentially they look at the properties of exoplanets discovered thus far by instruments like NASA's Kepler observatory. From that data, they've devised what they...