Daily News Channel
If you’ve ever looked at the moonless night sky from a spot where the air is clear and city lights are far away, you’ve seen the Milky Way — a band of stars so dense and so distant that they merge into a hazy ribbon of light.
The star known as Gliese 581 is utterly unremarkable in just about every way you can imagine.
Calling it a mission that may fundamentally change humanity’s view of itself, NASA on Friday prepared to launch a telescope that will search our corner of the Milky Way galaxy for Earth-like planets. The Kepler spacecraft is scheduled to blast into space on top of a Delta II rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida just before 11 p.m. ET.
As NASA prepares to hunt for Earth-like planets in our corner of the Milky Way galaxy, there’s new buzz that "Star Trek’s" vision of a universe full of life may not be that far-fetched. Pointy-eared aliens traveling at light speed are staying firmly in science fiction, but scientists are offering fresh insights into the possible existence of inhabited worlds and intelligent civilizations in space. There may be 100 billion Earth-like planets in the Milky Way, or one for every sun-type star in the galaxy, said Alan Boss, an astronomer with the Carnegie Institution and author of the new book “The Crowded Universe: The Search for Living Planets.” He made the prediction based on the number of “super-Earths” — planets several times the mass of the Earth, but smaller than gas giants like Jupiter — discovered so far circling stars outside the solar system.