Let's take a peek at the neighbours. The closest Earth-like planet is probably orbiting a star just 13 light years away. While that's too far for a visit, future telescopes should be able to see it and probe for signs of life. At a press event on 6 February, Courtney Dressing of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics presented data from NASA's Kepler telescope. Her team pulled out all the red dwarfs in Kepler's catalogue and found three with possible Earth-sized planets orbiting in the habitable zone, the region around a star where liquid water can exist.
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