New Planet, the size of Earth Discovered!

The National Optical Astronomy Observatory announced the discovery of Kepler-21b, a new planet that's close to the size of earth and is only about 352 light years away.

"By astronomical standards, that's right next door," Katy Garmany, the Deputy Press Officer at the National Optical Astronomy Observatory, told HuffPost.

Astronomers frequently discover new planets (according to Time magazine, we're up to over 2,000), but Garmany said that what's exciting about Kepler 21-b is that the planet is relatively Earth-sized. While its mass is about 10 times the size of our planet, its radius is only 1.6 times the size of Earth's.

"Until a few years ago, the smallest extra-solar planet that we had discovered was the size of Jupiter or Saturn, which are about ten times bigger than the Earth," Garmany said. "Now we're getting down to something almost the size of the Earth, showing that we have the technology to find the earth-size planets."

Source...
http://humanitariannews.org