TwitterYou guys, there has been some significant news released today. Are you ready for this?
NASA announced today that its Kepler spacecraft has spotted "Earth's bigger, older cousin"—the first nearly Earth-size planet to be found in the habitable zone of a star similar to our own. Do you know what this means?! We found our next vacation spot, y'all!
OK, maybe we're getting a head of ourselves. NASA can't say for sure whether the planet is rocky like ours or has water and air, but it's the closest match found so far, and that's pretty gnarly.
"Today, Earth is a little less lonely," Kepler researcher Jon Jenkins said.
The planet, which has been named Kepler-452b, is about 1,400 light-years from Earth in the constellation Cygnus (yeah, so it's quite the road trip...space trip? Whatever). It's about 60 percent bigger than Earth, NASA says, and is located in its star's habitable zone—the region where life-sustaining liquid water is possible on the surface of a planet.
A visitor there would experience gravity about twice that of Earth's (oooh, not sure how to feel about that), and planetary scientists say the odds of it having a rocky surface are "better than even."
Naturally, with such news, the Twitterverse didn't waste any time to voice their opinion (and, ya know, crack jokes):
What do you think about Earth 2.0? Sound off in the comments!