Yet Another Earth-like Planet

So, another new Earth-like planet has been discovered and officially announced located approximately 600 lightyears away and this new twin of Earth is just one of many recent profound discoveries. In fact, a lot has been going on lately in regards to space with several satellites falling to Earth, NASA announcing their plans to dump the ISS (Internaional Space Station) into the ocean and the discovery of over 700 exoplanets and a supermassive quasar boasting 140 trillion times the amount of water in all of Earth's oceans. Several of these newly discovered planets lie in the habitable zone of their star, the goldilocks zone, meaning that they are capable of harboring water and therefore life. Many scientists now agree that the probability of life existing elsewhere in the universe is virtually 100% and that it's just a matter of time before we find it. The atmospheric temperature of Kepler-22b is believed to be 22 degrees celsius, not far beneath the average room temperature of Earth with a mass 2.4 times greater than that of Earth.

Although it's a significant discovery, Kepler-22b is certainly not the first of it's kind. Recently a group of astronomers in Switzerland discovered over 50 new planets using HARPS, 16 of which were described as super-Earths. Located approximately 37 lightyears away, HD85512b is another planet that lies in the goldilocks zone with 3.6 times the mass of Earth and is the most habitable out of the planets discovered by the astronomers. Another planet located 20 million lightyears away and named Gliese 581c is yet another candidate for the existence of life that was discovered in 2007 and officially announced in 2008. Gliese 581c orbits a red dwarf star and is the fourth planet out of six in relation of distance from it's star.

Some researchers and scientists now believe that there may be a million or more planets within our own galaxy. With all of these new discoveries popping up all over the place thanks to state of the art devices such as the Hubble telescope do we really need to continue to wonder if there's other life out there? That's if they haven't found it already!