More livable than Earth? New index sizes up the habitability of alien exoplanets
NASA’s James Webb Telescope, shown in this artist’s conception, will provide more information about previously detected exoplanets. A new habitability index is aimed at helping the Webb team prioritize its search. Credit: NASA
Researchers at the University of Washington’s Virtual Planetary Laboratory have devised a new habitability index for judging how suitable alien planets might be for life, and the top prospects on their list are an Earthlike world called Kepler-442band a yet-to-be confirmed planet known as KOI 3456.02.
Those worlds both score higher than our own planet on the index: 0.955 for KOI 3456.02 and 0.836 for Kepler-442b, compared with 0.829 for Earth and 0.422 for Mars. The point of the exercise is to help scientists prioritize future targets for close-ups from NASA’s yet-to-be-launched James Webb Space Telescope and other instruments.
Astronomers have detected more than 1,000 confirmed planets and almost 5,000 candidates beyond our solar system, with most of them found by NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope. More than 100 of those have been characterized as potentially habitable, and hundreds more are thought to be waiting in the wings. The Webb telescope is expected to start taking a closer look soon after its scheduled launch in 2018.
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