NASA has scheduled a news conference for later today to announce new results from the Kepler space probe. Kepler is maintaining an unblinking gaze on a specific part of the Milky Way, looking for planets orbiting other stars by noting dips in a star's brightness that could be caused by a planet moving between the star and Kepler. Speculation is that NASA will announce it has found an Earth-like planet, and possibly one that orbits in its star's habitable zone-- possibly as part of a system of planets.
The habitable zone of a star refers to the space around it in which a planet could orbit and never get too hot or too cold to support life as we know it. Roughly, it's the distance from the star at which water could exist in liquid form on the surface of an Earth-like world.
If that is in fact the news, it would be a huge discovery-- one of the most significant yet in the Space Age. Coming on the heels of the announcement by astronomers using Earth-based telescopes that they have found a star system with at least five, and possibly seven planets, such an announcement could mark the opening of a new era of our understanding of the universe and our place within it.
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