One week ago, NASA announced that their Kepler satellite had found two habitable worlds outside of Earth’s constellation–more than 1,200 light years away.  The satellite, launched in 2009, has a goal of examining stars to discover a planet resembling Earth.  So far, it has examined more than 150,000 stars.

“With all of these discoveries we’re finding, Earth is looking less and less like a special place and more like there’s Earth-like things everywhere,” Thomas Barclay, a scientist working on the Kepler satellite, said.

The two planets are the smallest planets ever found in the “habitable zone,” the area near a star in which a planet can theoretically hold water.

“There could definitely be life on the planets!  I mean, how many other stars exist out there?  There must be some other life out there,” senior Rowan Hamilton, a student in Colleen O’Toole’s Astronomy class, said.

Although many would like to explore these planets, we won’t be landing on them anytime soon–the planets are an estimated 1,200 light years away (a single light year is about 6 trillion miles away).

“Though it’s possible that the planets could hold life, it’s not likely.  The temperatures on these planets are often extreme–up to 4,000 degrees.  Humans definitely couldn’t live there,” junior Brittany Thompson, another student in O’Toole’s Astronomy class, said.

Fascinating as it is, the planets will most likely remain a mystery for our lifetime, and we will probably never be able to visit them.  Instead, NASA is shifting its sights, creating the possibility of landing on unknown planet sometime soon.

“Future NASA missions are going to focus on more nearby stars that we can look at in much more detail,” Barclay said.