Top Twenty Places to Find for Alien Life, say Astronomers

Astronomers have presently released a list of the 20 top candidates we have for a 'second Earth', saying that if we want to discover life beyond the Solar System, these are our total best shots (that we know of).

Whittled down from a catalogue of more than 4,000 exoplanets exposed by NASA’s Kepler mission, the ‘top 20’ were singled out as being the majority likely to be rocky and inhabitable.

This is the total catalogue of all of the Kepler discovery that are in the habitable zone of their host stars," said one of the team, Stephen Kane from San Francisco State University. "That income we can focus in on the planets in this paper and carry out follow-up studies to learn extra about them, including if they are indeed habitable."
At the last count, Kepler has exposed 4,706 exoplanet candidates, 2,327 of which have been established. 

From those, Kane and his team recognized 216 planets situated within the 'habitable zone' of their star, where the conditions make it strictly possible for liquid water to live on the surface.

From these, the researchers figured out which planets had the top chance of being presently like Earth, with the most perfect place in the habitable zone, a rocky work of art, and an Earth-like size. 

If we’re ever leaving to launch a mission beyond our Solar System to discover a second home or alien life, we now have a shortlist of the 20 top places to get started. And yep, our boy Kepler 186-f complete the cut.bigger version of the above figure.

"There are very limited resources obtainable for study the atmospheres of terrestrial planets and so the Habitable Zone is used to choose those planets the majority likely to have liquid water on the surface," Kane told Darrell Etherington at Tech Crunch. "This will become more and more important once fresh facilities, such as the James Webb Space Telescope, are deploy."

The team is currently working on getting to know the summit 20' even better, by trying to figure out the planets’ composition - they require the right mixture of elements like carbon, silicon, oxygen, &  iron to suspend with Earth’s supreme habitability.The results have been published in The Astrophysical Journal.

And hey, you strength be feeling frustrated about how long it's leaving to take us to actually expand the technical capabilities to send spacecraft past the Solar System so we can actually make sure these planets out, but by the time we do, we might really be right on time for aliens.

As a fresh study suggested this week, it might sound rational to say that Earth probably isn't all that special in such an unfathomable, unknowable Universe filled of endless potential, but maybe it actually is. Maybe we peaked earlier than all else, relative to the birth of the Universe, and we've not yet hit the time for when life on other planets could sensibly emerge. 

"If you ask, 'When is life the majority likely to emerge?' you power naively say, 'Now,'" said one of the researchers, Avi Loeb from the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics. "But we discover that the chance of life grows a great deal higher in the distant future."

Maybe once we in fact get to one of those exoplanets, alien life will be correct there waiting for us.