Habitable Zone - Finding Habitable Zone Planets and Moons

Finding Habitable Zone Planets and Moons

See also: Planetary habitability and Natural satellite habitability

Goldilocks planets are of key interest to researchers looking either for existing (and possibly intelligent) life or for future homes for the human race.

The Drake equation, which attempts to estimate the likelihood of non-terrestrial intelligent life, incorporates a factor (ne) for the average number of life-supporting planets in a star system with planets. The discovery of extrasolar Goldilocks planets helps to refine estimates for this figure. Very low estimates would contribute to the Rare Earth hypothesis, which posits that a series of extremely unlikely events and conditions led to the rise of life on Earth. High estimates would reinforce the Copernican mediocrity principle, in that large numbers of Goldilocks planets would imply that Earth is not especially exceptional.

Finding Earth-sized Goldilocks planets is a key part of the Kepler Mission, which uses a space telescope (launched on 7 March 2009 UTC) to survey and compile the characteristics of habitable-zone planets. As of April 2011, Kepler has discovered 1,235 possible planets, with 54 of those candidates located within the Goldilocks zone.

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