The “habitable zone” in astronomy-speak is the area around a star where liquid water could exist. It’s not, like, some cozy astronaut campground off in the cosmos. We know now for sure that about 600 light years away the planet known as Kepler-22b orbits in one, even coming awfully close to an orbit around its star matching an Earth-year. We also know that Kepler-22b is a bit over twice the size of Earth, making it the smallest planet we’ve found in a habitable zone.Of course, we think we’ve found a lot more than Kepler-22b — you might recall a whole lot of breathless announcing earlier this year — but this is the first one we’ve actually confirmed. Today’s NASA announcement also notes that the Kepler mission’s identified about 1,000 more habitable zone planet candidates.Read the rest at Motherboard.
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