The Goldilocks Zone, or the Habitable Zone: The region around a star within which planetary-mass objects with sufficient atmospheric pressure can support liquid water at their surfaces. Translation: they can support intelligent life.
* The search for exoplanets has been in full tilt since the 1970s, but the first one was discovered by accident in 1992.
* Kepler is a space observatory launched by NASA to discover Earth-like planets orbiting other stars. The spacecraft, named after the Renaissance astronomer Johannes Kepler was launched on March 7, 2009.
|Kepler Space Observatory|
* But Kepler has incurred technical difficulties. NASA is attempting to fix the problems. Stay tuned.
* There are potentially hundreds of billions of planets in our galaxy. And there approximately 100 too 200 million galaxies. You don’t have to do the math to conclude there are a lot of exoplanets out there.
* Then there are the moons that could orbit these exoplanets. Our solar system alone has 8 planets (sorry Pluto) and 166 moons. So it’s not only exoplanets, but the moons, that could fall into the “Goldilocks Zone.”
* The closest exoplanet to us is Alpha Centauri Bb. It orbits our Sun’s closest star at just over 4 light years away and was discovered in 2012.
* So far 10 exoplanets have been discovered where liquid water could exist on their surface.