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Hey ET, Are You Out There? Kepler Helps SETI Tune In

The needle-in-a-haystack search for extraterrestrial signals has narrowed a bit, thanks to NASA's Kepler spacecraft. Scientists announced that, of the 1,235 candidate planets discovered by Kepler, 54 of them were in what's known as the Goldilocks zone, a region close enough to its home sun where a planet may harbor...

Cosmic Census Finds Crowd of Planets in Our Galaxy

WASHINGTON -- Scientists have estimated the first cosmic census of planets in our galaxy and the numbers are astronomical: at least 50 billion planets in the Milky Way. At least 500 million of those planets are in the not-too-hot, not-too-cold zone where life could exist. The numbers were extrapolated from the early...

2010: A Space Odyssey to Find Earth-Like Planets

(Aug. 2) -- Space, the final frontier. This is the voyage of the spacecraft Kepler. Its four-year mission is to seek out new worlds, boldly going where no one has gone before -- and early analysis shows it may have found many cousins to our home planet. Kepler, NASA's deep-space probe, has located hundreds of objects...