New Planet Discovered

NASA mission has discovered a second Earth-sized, rocky planet within the habitable zone of its star -- the range of distances where liquid water could occur on a planet's surface

All astronomers concur that planets are created in protoplanetary discs, which are the bands of gas and dust that encircle newly formed, young stars. Even though the universe has hundreds of these discs, it has been challenging to observe genuine planetary birth and development in these settings.Currently, astronomers at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian have created a novel method to find these elusive newborn planets, along with "smoking gun" proof of a small Neptune or Saturn-like planet hiding in a disc. The Astrophysical Journal Letters today published a description of the findings.According to Feng Long, a postdoctoral scholar at the Center for Astrophysics and project leader, "directly finding young planets is highly tough and has thus far only been effective in one or two situations." Because they are encased in substantial amounts of gas and dust, planets are always too dim for us to see them.Instead, they must look for signs that a planet is forming ..

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope detected signs of water, evidence for clouds and haze, in the atmosphere of a hot, puffy gas giant planet orbiting a Sun-like star over a thousand light years away

For the project, the computer looked at a small chunk of data gathered by Kepler from 2009 to 2013