The discovery of an Earth-like planet: fact or scientific hypothesis?

ArabiaWeather.com- Recently, we have been reading a lot of news or articles about the discovery of an Earth-like planet elsewhere in our galaxy, the Milky Way. Is this real, or is it just a fantasy that space scientists wish for?

To answer this question, we must first list some scientific facts, in order to be able to imagine the location of the Earth in the universe, and the possibility that there are other planets that embrace life in addition to our beautiful blue planet.

The universe that we know is so vast that our human minds are unable to comprehend it. We know with certainty that there are billions of galaxies in this universe, at a time when each of these galaxies contains billions of stars, and around every star there is an opportunity for existence. Planets revolve around it, and among these planets there is a chance that we will find a planet that embraces a form of life, as is the case in our small planet "Earth", which revolves around the star "the sun".

When looking at this fact, the possibility that Earth is the only planet that embraces life appears to be a very weak possibility mathematically, as the universe may be full of life forms, which may differ in form and content from the forms of life that we see on this planet.

It seems that the human mind is really unable to accommodate the multiplicity of life forms in the oceans and seas that exist here on earth, let alone those who assume that there are no other forms of life in all this extended universe.

With the development of technology, humans began in the twentieth century to search for the presence or absence of life in the planets of our solar system, and began sending space probes to Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and the moons surrounding these planets, all of which were distinguished, through research results, by the absence of any form of life, not even life. microscopic, although some doubts remain about Jupiter's moon "Europa" because it has a thick ice cover that may hide an ocean of water that receives some forms of life.

Searching for an Earth-like planet outside our solar system

And as soon as the twenty-first century began, man intensified his search for forms of life outside our solar system, so that the search moved to large parts of the Milky Way galaxy, through the “Kepler” telescope mission that was launched in 2009, as the function of this mission lies in the detection of stars. Like the sun and the existence of Earth-like planets revolving around it.

Since then, scientists have been constantly discovering planets outside our solar system that revolve in a fixed orbit around other stars in the galaxy, and most of them are huge, very cold or very hot gas planets, but some of these planets raise great questions.

The most prominent discovery in this field was the planet "Kepler-22", which was discovered on 5-12-2011. It is a planet orbiting in a habitable range, around a star that resembles the sun and is 620 light-years away from us. It is believed to contain large bodies of water and moderate temperatures.

The principle by which Kepler is able to monitor the planets surrounding the stars in our galaxy depends on the change in the illumination of the stars, as the stars whose lighting fades periodically indicate the rotation of the planets around them, and through complex calculations, the computer assumes the distance of the planet from the star and a number of other information that we cannot Check it out.

So the issue of finding Earth-like planets is not like looking directly through a telescope at the planets in our solar system, but in fact it depends on a lot of guesswork and assumptions that may or may not be true.

See also:

Discover a new planet rich in water

The discovery of a planet with the longest orbit around its sun

The discovery of clouds made of water for the first time outside the solar system