Are There Other Earths?

What are the odds of life on planets orbiting nearby stars? Scientists, wielding sensitive new telescopes and "big data" tools, have detected planets around thousands of stars; some Sun-like and some very different from our star.

There's a lot of prime real estate out there in space. ... There are a billion Earths in this galaxy, roughly speaking

The universe plays host to a surprising number of planets that appear quite similar to our own. Is it possible that humans could occupy any of these...

But several other exoplanet discoveries came nearly as close in their similarity to Earth. Before this, the planet Kepler-186f held the “most similar”

Discovering the first true "alien Earth" is a long-held dream of astronomers — and recent exoplanet discoveries suggest that their dream will come ... When telescope technology improves,other factors will be considered as well

That most intriguing one is called Kepler-62f, a rocky world just 1.4 times bigger thanEarth that circles a star smaller and dimmer than the sun. Kepler-62f's newfound neighbor, Kepler-62e, is just 1.6 times larger than Earth

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And three orbit within the star's habitable zone, where temperatures are just right thatthere could be whole oceans on the planets' surfaces. Given that liquid water is such an essential ingredient for life here on our planet,