I am sure we are getting better at looking into space. Beside the end of the world is near and we need a new home for those who are nice to others.
Lens technology is much better then it used to be plus better software to filling fuzzy stuff. So maybe that last planet was a dust might but only time will tell.
Three newly found planets are some of the best candidates so far for habitable worlds outside our solar system, according to NASA scientists.
NASA's Kepler satellite, which is keeping an eye on more than 150,000 stars in hopes of identifying Earth-like planets, found the trio.
"Earth is looking less and less like a special place and more like there's Earth-like things everywhere," said Kepler scientist Tom Barclay.
Two of the planets, described in the journal Science, are 1,200 light-years away; the other is 2,700 light-years away. A light-year, the distance that light travels in a vacuum in one year, is nearly 6 trillion miles. Ref. CNN
Exciting news. But it would be a mistake thinking that earth-like planet means habitable planet. That indicates a planet that has a similar distance from its sun, a size that is not gigantic and, hopefully, a rocky structure rather than gaseous (but not always is possible to tell a gas planet from one that possess an atmosphere only analyzing the light spectrum). Mainly, these kind of bodies are conjectured rather than directly observed. We know something is there by registering anomalies in a star light emission or infinitesimal disturbances to its orbit (or to that of the larger planets that orbit around it). Usually, the planets detected with this system, are quite big and not really comparable to our own. If a twin of Earth was orbiting a star more than 1000 light-years from the Solar System, we would not be able to detect it with our current technology.