Astrophysicists: We Don't Want to Jump the Gun, But We Think We've Found the Legendary "Mongo System" From Flash Gordon

Well they didn't say that but they did say they've found a five-planet system with two of the most earth-like planets ever discovered.

Caveat on that: They're not really all that earth-like. But usually they find super-Jupiter planets. Finding planets even close to earth is hard, because they're so small.

But these are all quite a bit bigger than earth. You might want to go to these places to train for a sporting event, but I don't know if you'd be comfortable living there.

NASA's Kepler mission has discovered two new planetary systems that include three super-Earth-size planets in the "habitable zone," the range of distance from a star where the surface temperature of an orbiting planet might be suitable for liquid water.

The Kepler-62 system has five planets; 62b, 62c, 62d, 62e and 62f. The Kepler-69 system has two planets; 69b and 69c. Kepler-62e, 62f and 69c are the super-Earth-sized planets.

Two of the newly discovered planets orbit a star smaller and cooler than the sun. Kepler-62f is only 40 percent larger than Earth, making it the exoplanet closest to the size of our planet known in the habitable zone of another star. Kepler-62f is likely to have a rocky composition. Kepler-62e, orbits on the inner edge of the habitable zone and is roughly 60 percent larger than Earth.

The third planet, Kepler-69c, is 70 percent larger than the size of Earth, and orbits in the habitable zone of a star similar to our sun. Astronomers are uncertain about the composition of Kepler-69c, but its orbit of 242 days around a sun-like star resembles that of our neighboring planet Venus.

Yeah, pass.

Okay no one's going to want to live on these sucky planets, but we're getting closer to finding one that might suit our purposes.

Land grab, baby.

posted by Ace at 04:30 PM

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