Thanks largely to the Kepler space telescope, astronomers have discovered more than 2,000 planets orbiting distant stars — not half bad considering that until recently we knew of only eight planets in the entire universe, all of them in the immediate neighborhood. The point of Kepler isn't simply to rack up numbers, though: the ultimate goal is to find worlds similar to Earth — places where there's a chance that alien life might have taken hold. Those planets could then get a closer look as a new, more powerful generation of telescopes comes on line.
But the search for life across interstellar space will still not be easy, and even the most advanced telescope on the drawing boards will have to work hard to suss it out, so it will be key to choose the best possible targets.
That's the reasoning behind a new paper in the journal Astrobiology in which environmental scientist Dirk Schulze-Makuch, of Washington State University, along with nine other colleagues, has proposed a new planet-classification scheme to make the sifting process easier. Read Full
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