Despite the hype New Earth was NOT FOUND.
The best Nasa could come up with was ‘Kepler 22b’, a gassy lump 800 light years away, I mean… Meanwhile their blog complained that future missions have been cancelled for lack of funds, and after months of silence took a lot of planets off their ‘possibles’ list, saying that ‘starlight is much more variable than expected’..
Finally on Dec 20th ‘Kepler 20’ system was announced.. earth sized, okay, but orbiting their sun in a few days at 1000s of degrees C.
What we expected were earth sized planets in the habitable zone, at a few light years distance, with a magnetic field, etc… Statistically these planets must exist in the 1000s of planets discovered.
Nasa can’t find them because: a)The Kepler telescope is too small and the next ones (TPF and SIM) are cancelled. b) Planets in the habitable zone are likely to cross in front of their suns only once or twice an earth year, and so take years to confirm by that method. They can spot ‘Jupiter’ gas giants and ‘Mercury’ hells okay. c) The ‘unreliable starlight’ problem.
The Kepler mission does release huge amounts of raw data, after a long delay, so teams of scientists and individuals are searching like crazy, combining with data from other telescopes, exciting new methods and instruments, in the continuing hunt for New Earth.
http://kepler.nasa.gov/news/newsaboutplanetfinding/
It’s still possible some genius kid could find New Earth in this big pile of numbers
The Free 