Hundreds of years from now, says Sara Seager, "people will look back at us, and they won't remember me or you. They'll remember us as the generation of people who first found the Earth-like worlds" outside our Solar System. This year, scientists have come tantalizingly close, says Seager, an astronomer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge. NASAs Kepler space telescope, which monitors thousands of stars for dimming caused by an orbiting planet, has found 28 confirmed exoplanets this year, including one that is slightly bigger than Earth and in its star's habitable zone. More than 2,000 await verification.
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