The search for Earth-like planets

Improved technology is leading to interesting new findings regarding extrasolar planets. NASA’s current list of exoplanets includes 403 objects. Research efforts including the Spitzer Space Telescope, the Wide Area Search for Planets (WASP), and Kepler have recently helped discover extrasolar planets that challenge naturalistic origins theories. Great efforts are underway to find exoplanets that are “Earth-like” and that are within the “habitable zone” around stars. The Gliese 581 system has four extrasolar planets, one of which is only about two Earth masses. A second is believed to be within the habitable zone, but little is known about the planet itself. The WASP program has found one planet that could spiral into the star in less than one million years, and another planet which orbits the star retrograde (opposite to the star’s spin direction). The new Kepler instrument will provide very high quality data on transiting extrasolar planets in our galaxy.