An artist's illustration of an Earth-like planet. The search for planets that are similar to Earth is one of NASA's main goals. Many planets have already been discovered orbiting other stars, but so far only larger planets (the size of Jupiter or larger) have been found. New missions are being planned by NASA which will be able to detect smaller Earth-sized planets. Some of these missions will also try to detect signs of life on these planets by studying emissions in their atmospheres.
BILLIONS OF EARTHS COULD BE OUT THERE!!

10/19/10

706 Earthlike Planets Discovered By NASA Spacecraft‏

SOURCE: Space.com
18 June 2010

NASA's Kepler spacecraft hunting for Earth-like planets around other stars has found 706 candidates for potential alien worlds while gazing at more than 156,000 stars packed into a single patch of the sky.

If all 706 of these objects pass the stringent follow-up tests to determine if they are actually planets, and not false alarms, they could nearly triple the current number of known extrasolar planets. They were announced as part of a huge release of data from the mission's first 43 days by NASA's Kepler science team this week.

The Kepler space observatory monitors stars for subtle changes in their brightness, which could indicate the presence of alien planets passing in front of them as seen from Earth. Astronomers will use the newly-released data from Kepler to determine if orbiting planets are responsible for the variation in brightness of several hundred stars.

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For more information:

Millions of Earths? Talk causes a stir See Video!
A World of Difference between 'Earth-Like' and 'Earth-Sized'
140 Earth-like planets discovered in the Milky Way by Kepler See Video!
Dimitar Sasselov: How we found hundreds of Earth-like planets See Video!
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