Search For Alien Planets

This is not an E.T. - extraterrestrial - article about strange looking creatures that may or may not exist. The word "Alien" is used in the title to denote a different planet from our own.

Five-hundred light-years away (that's 500 multiplied by just under 6 trillion miles) a twin Earth orbits a star that is very similar to our sun. Life formed on this planet based on a combination of carbon, helium, oxygen, nitrogen, and hydrogen.
A star, like our Sun, is made up of those very same elements. Therefore, life in this vast universe has to be abundant, and not just on this one miniscule, rudimentary planet referred to as Earth.

Carbon is a naturally abundant nonmetallic element which forms the basis of most living organisms. It is the fourth most abundant element in the universe, not just here where we reside, but in the entire, never-ending, perpetually expanding multiverse.

http://kepler.nasa.gov/multimedia/artwork

In 2009, NASA launched the six-hundred million dollar Kepler Space Observatory to discover Earth-like planets orbiting other stars. Kepler's primary instrument is a photometer that continually monitors the brightness of over 145,000 main sequence stars in a fixed field of view.

The data is transmitted to Earth and analyzed to detect periodic dimming caused by planets that cross in front of their host star (the Sun is our host star).

Before Kepler, astrophysicist didn't know what fraction of stars had planets. So far, Kepler (named after German mathematician, astronomer, and astrologer, Johannes Kepler) has discovered over 1000 planets outside of our solar system (referred to as exoplanets). Most of the stars that you see at night are orbited by planets. That's because the by-product of star formation are planets that rotate around a particular star; just as 8 planets rotate around the sun. Twenty-one of the planets discovered by Kepler orbit their star at the right distance (not too close, and not too far away, considered a 'Goldilocks planet') to have a climate, similar to Earth and may have oceans teeming with life.



Consider the fact that, all these exoplanets have the same elements that created life on this planet: carbon, helium, nitrogen, and hydrogen. Therefore, if life formed on Earth, it most definitely formed on myriad other planets as well. Unless you still hold the primitive belief that Earth is the center of the universe.

Italian philosopher, astronomer, and mathematician, Giordano Bruno, his theories expanded on the Copernicus' heliocentric model. Bruno's mathematical suppositions anticipated modern science but to the misfortune of humankind, the Church chose to burn him alive because his findings differed from the Bible. One of Bruno's more memorable quotes regarding the universe:

"Innumerable suns exist. Innumerable earths revolve around these. Living beings inhabit these worlds."

After Bruno made his findings public and refused to recant, Pope Clement VIII ordered that he be sentenced as an "impenitent and pertinacious heretic." In February 1600, he was brought to the Campo de' Fiori, his tongue in a gag, and burned alive.