New Most Earth-Like Planet Yet Discovered

NASA scientists operating the Kepler Space Telescope have been scouring the skies for planets with similar characteristics to earth. Such 'exoplanets' might harbour life like our own or indeed provide us safe refuge should we ever need to leave our own planet in a hurry.

Ideally such a planet would be about earth's size, rocky, with an atmosphere and be located in the so-called Goldilocks zone of its star system, not too hot and not too cold in relation to its local star, just like earth is in relation to the Sun. So far over 1000 such exoplanets have been found, of varying degrees of earth-likeness.

And NASA says that the most Earth-like of the new arrivals, known as Kepler 438b, is most likely even more similar to our home than Kepler 186f which was the previous most earth-like exoplanet discovered.

You can read more about the find courtesy of the BBC here.