Stellary Starry Universe

In a significant milestone on the road to finding Earth's "twin" elsewhere in the galaxy, NASA's Kepler mission has confirmed its first planet in the habitable zone of a distant Sun-like star.

In a significant milestone on the road to finding Earth's "twin" elsewhere in the galaxy, NASA's Kepler mission has confirmed its first planet in the habitable zone of a distant Sun-like star.

On Launch Pad 17-B at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, United Launch Alliance’s Delta II rocket carrying NASA’s Kepler spacecraft rises through the exhaust cloud created by the firing of the rocket’s engines. Liftoff was on time at 10:49 p.m. EST on March 6, 2009. Kepler is a space-borne telescope designed to search the nearby region of our galaxy for Earth-size planets orbiting in the habitable zone of stars like our sun. The habitable zone is the region around a star where temperatures permit water to be liquid on a planet’s surface. The challenge for Kepler is to look at a large number of stars in order to statistically estimate the total number of Earth-size planets orbiting sun-like stars in the habitable zone. Kepler will survey more than 100,000 stars in our galaxy. Image credit: NASA, Regina Mitchell-Ryall and Tom Farrar

NASA will host a news briefing at 8 a.m. PST, Monday, Dec. 5, to announce new discoveries by the Kepler mission. The briefing, during the Kepler Science Conference, will be in building 152 at NASA’s Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif.

The existence of a world with a double sunset, as portrayed in the film Star Wars more than 30 years ago, is now scientific fact. NASA's Kepler mission has made the first unambiguous detection of a "circumbinary planet" — a planet orbiting two stars — 200 light-years from Earth.