Written by Melanie Kozlan, Four Green Steps

A new Earth-sized planet has been discovered relatively near Earth: the Kepler-21b is only 352 light-years away!

From the Huffington Post:

Astronomers frequently discover new planets (according to Time magazine, we're up to over 2,000), but Garmany said that what's exciting about Kepler 21-b is that the planet is relatively Earth-sized. While its mass is about 10 times the size of our planet, its radius is only 1.6 times the size of Earth's.

"Until a few years ago, the smallest extra-solar planet that we had discovered was the size of Jupiter or Saturn, which are about ten times bigger than the Earth," Garmany said. "Now we're getting down to something almost the size of the Earth, showing that we have the technology to find the earth-size planets."

Image courtesy of Creative Commons.

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