'Earth-like planets will soon be found'

An official of the US Aeronautics Agency (NASA) and many other astronomers insist they will find a planet with life in four or five years.

At the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society this week, scientists discussed the discovered extrasolar planets. They concluded: The universe has a lot of planet-like planets - where life can grow - although those planets are constantly suffering from the effects of stellar explosions, the tremendous gravitational force of black holes and intergalactic collisions.

Simon Worden, director of NASA's Ames Research Center, said the fundamental question that humans need to answer is: Is Earth the only planet that has life?

'I bet we are not alone in the universe and life exists on so many planets,' he said.

Worden told AP: 'I hope we will find a planet the size of the earth in the space that life can grow'.

Worden's Ames Research Center controls the Kepler space telescope - the device launched into space to search for planets outside the solar system.

Illustration of a rocky planet and Earth's earth water. Photo: AP .

Unlike the Hubble space telescope, Kepler glass is designed to perform the mission of searching for planets. It has a device for measuring light intensity. This device is capable of measuring the brightness of more than 100,000 stars at the same time. Thus Kepler will detect dark spots on the stars. Those dark spaces are created by planets as they pass in front of the stars.

Life can only exist on planet-like planets, not on planet Jupiter. In addition, it must not be too close or too far from its own star so that water - the necessary material of life - can exist in liquid form. If the planet is too close to its own star, water will constantly evaporate because of heat. Conversely, if they are too far from their own star, the water will freeze because of the cold.

The speed of finding extrasolar planets is increasing. In the 90s, astronomers only discovered a few planets each year. But in the past 10 years, they found a few planets every month. In the early days of 2010, the Kepler telescope found 5 new planets. Now the total number of planets people have discovered has reached more than 400. However, all of them have no favorable conditions for the development of living activities.

Experts say the situation will change thanks to Kepler.

'Thanks to Kepler, we found signs that the universe has a lot of small planets, but they have not been discovered , ' said Geoff Marcy, an expert at the University of California, USA. Marcy is one of the pioneering scientists in the field of planetary search.

According to Marcy, if an earth-like planet is in Kepler's view (from several hundred to several thousand light years), this telescope will detect it. But scientists need up to three years to determine the orbit of the planet. The ability to find planets with Earth-equivalent sizes is not large, because most of them are much larger than our world.