On Monday, NASA acknowledged it was a tiny step closer to discovering life may exist elsewhere in the universe. NASA released a list of 219 new “planet candidates” discovered by the Kepler space telescope, which was searching for planets orbiting other stars in the constellation Cygnus. Ten of those planets are similar to Earth’s size and reside in their star’s “habitable zone.” The “habitable zone” is the area in a distance from a star where liquid water can pool.
According to JPL, the Kepler space telescope looks for planets by detecting the tiny drop in a star’s brightness that occurs when a planet crosses in front of it, called a transit.
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