COMMENTARY | On Monday, according to Yahoo News, NASA announced that it discovered the first planet in the habitable zone, an area with a distance from a star where temperatures will permit the existence of liquid water. This is an amazing discovery by the Kepler space telescope on board the Kepler spacecraft, and the first potentially habitable alien world that we know of.
The planet is 600 light-years away from Earth, and it completely orbits its star, strikingly similar to our own sun, every 290 days, just 75 days short of an Earth year. The planet’s average surface temperature is even a comfortable 72 degrees, and its radius is 2.4 times that of our own planet.
Kepler program scientist, Douglas Hudgins said in a statement, “This is a major milestone on the road to finding Earth’s twin.”
Scientists believe we are well on our way to discovering our Earth-like planets that are inhabitable. We may be just scratching the surface of what exists in the infinite world of space. This stretches our imagination to far-reaching possibilities. Can you imagine what our view of space might be by the end of the 21st century? The possibilities are endless.
2011 has been a year for some incredible discoveries. In September, the European Organization for Nuclear Research said is had defied the law of physics and Albert Einstein’s time-tested theory that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light.
According to Mail Online, physicists at CERN research institute near Geneva, Switzerland, conducted an experiment in which they sent a beam of neutrinos 500 miles from their facility to a lab in Italy. The scientists discovered the neutrinos had arrived 60 billionth of a second quicker than the speed of light, possibly breaking the most fundamental law of the Universe: thou shalt not travel faster than light.
This finding could change everything we know about the basics of physics and essentially the way our world and the universe works altogether. What makes this especially interesting is that anything that goes faster than the speed of light also goes backward in time. Imagine the possibilities.
2012 may be another exciting year for space exploration and scientific discoveries, and our human minds may not even be able to comprehend what our future holds.